As the memes would “say,” if this picture caught your eye, it’s time for the more thorough check-ups that come with advancing age.

But why on earth is the wolf from Nu, Pogodi!, the Soviet cartoon whose title means “Well, Just You Wait!,” collecting eggs instead of chasing the hare? How did the wolf actually make it possible for Nintendo to turn from a playing-card company to electronics? And why is this story the exact opposite of another cult game of the same generation, Tetris, which came out of the USSR?

Oh, the fate of the egg-catching wolf, such a good friend to the kids of the 1980s and 1990s, turns out to be quite unexpected.

A Thousand and One Nights

If, thousands of years ago, you collected eggs in this game, do you remember what happened when you reached 1,000 points?

Let’s check, because you had to be among the nimblest nineties kids, with the skills of an octopus, not to give up at the unimaginable speed with which the hens maliciously fired out their eggs.

In fact, a piece of retro folklore still drifts around the internet: beat the game, and you get to see a never-before-suspected episode of Nu, Pogodi! that was never shown on television. Plenty of people still claim to have seen it, but… no such thing ever existed. Not because we weren’t good enough (some were, at the price of calluses on their thumbs), but because there was never any film in there. At 999 the counter goes back to zero, the eggs start rolling about a third faster, and that’s it.

The Russian Wikipedia puts it mercilessly: “No special reward was ever intended.” Just like in Tetris, as it happens. But, and this holds for both, with enough will you can always set yourself the next goal.

Admittedly, we are rather spoiled today. On a screen like this, where all the figures are “printed” in advance and can only light up and go dark, there can be no cartoon in principle. The only animation in the entire device is the clock mode, in which the wolf catches eggs by himself, without us.

The Wolf from Kyoto

The idea was born not on a collective farm but in the head of a citizen of Kyoto who watched a bored office worker on the bullet train. Later, without his knowing it, his idea would be “replicated” in a Soviet factory. And later still, in its own peculiar way, it would be returned, when Tetris left the USSR to become the most recognizable game in the world, mostly thanks to the Japanese maker Nintendo.

On the forum Our Childhood, one contributor recalls getting it in sixth or seventh grade and carrying it everywhere, until one day, “on a walk along the pier, it fell out of my pocket into the sea.” His parents had saved up for it, and he still feels guilty.

Another reader remembers that there was one kid in her apartment block with the “eggs,” and everyone sat on the stairs and took turns. A third writes that he bought it for his son in 1990, when the boy was 12, and he himself had fun with it “even more than he did.” Sound familiar?

The Alarm-Clock Game

Let’s go back to the source. The game Nu, Pogodi! first appeared in the December 1984 issue of Novye Tovary (New Goods), the bulletin of the Soviet Ministry of Trade. No model number, just Nu, Pogodi! Only later did it get its official name, Elektronika IM-02. IM stands for “igra mikroprotsessornaya,” a microprocessor game. The IM-01 was a chess computer nobody remembers.

The price was 25 rubles (later 23), at a time when salaries were 150–200 rubles. In 1985 alone, three factories, in Zelenograd, Arzamas and Oryol, turned out more than 400,000 units, and in the following years a dozen or so plants scattered across the USSR joined in. Production stopped only in the mid-1990s, when the state that had started it no longer existed. The Belarusian version of the same wolf, however, came out in 2000 and is still played today.

The game is also a clock, which is why the Nintendo series that first introduced it is called Game & Watch. The “Vremya” (Time) button shows the hour, while the wolf on the screen keeps catching eggs and now and then dropping them, just like that, for decoration. There is an alarm too: when it rings, the hare appears in the little window at the top and strikes a bell. For a whole minute, the same single note, brrr…

The time is set with the tip of a ballpoint pen pressed into two recessed buttons. There is no 24-hour mode, because in Kyoto they didn’t plan for one and in Zelenograd they didn’t dare add it: instead of AM and PM, the screen says DP and PP, “do poludnya” and “posle poludnya,” before noon and after noon.

Four hens, four chutes, four buttons. Nothing complicated, wouldn’t you say? Every egg caught is a point. Miss one, and a chick hatches from the broken egg and you get a penalty; three of those and it’s over. But if the hare is peeking out of the little window, the penalty is halved and the chick only blinks. At 200 and at 500 eggs the misses are wiped clean. “Game A” has three chutes, “Game B” four. Every hundred eggs the pace eases off for a moment, then climbs again. And on toward the thousand, where the speed is not for the faint of heart (or fingers).

Collectors today tell the production batches apart by the wolf’s boxer shorts: they come with polka dots, with flowers or with stars, and the last are the rarest.

Two Centuries of Card Games

And so from the USSR we fly off to Japan. Gunpei Yokoi was born on September 10, 1941, in Kyoto. He studied electronics and in 1965 joined Nintendo. Yes, that well-known company, which at the time was still mostly in the business of making playing cards, something it had been doing since 1889!

Not the kind Bulgarians shuffle for belote, but a variety called hanafuda, played with flowers. Yokoi was hired to maintain the machines that stamped them.

But how do you get from stamping to the wolf with the eggs? His boss, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the founder’s great-grandson, was at the time frantically looking for something else for the firm to do, because cards were no longer selling well enough. He tried a taxi business. He tried hotels rented “by the hour.” He tried instant rice. Well, none of it took off.

One day he caught the young technician playing during working hours with a folding wooden grabber arm he had invented himself. In most companies that ends with a scolding; in this case it ended with an order to have the toy in the shops by Christmas. The Ultra Hand sold 1.2 million units.

Nintendo discovered it could make toys, and Yokoi that he could invent them. Next came the Love Tester (1969: two people hold hands and a needle shows how much they love each other by measuring… electric current), a light gun with solar cells in the targets, and entire shooting galleries built in bankrupt bowling alleys.

Yokoi Rocks!

The legend, as Yokoi himself later told it, dates from the late 1970s. On a shinkansen, the bullet train, the inventor watched a man in a suit pressing the buttons of a pocket calculator. He wasn’t calculating anything, just pressing them, a forerunner of today’s screen zombies. And Yokoi wondered: if a bored grown man does that with a calculator, what would he do with something made for playing? Something small, that hides in your palm, so people don’t give you funny looks on the subway.

How the idea reached the president is also a legend that may or may not be true…, but it’s a charming one. Yamauchi’s chauffeur fell ill, and Yokoi got behind the wheel to drive him to a meeting. On the way he told him about the calculator. The meeting turned out to be with the president of Sharp, the biggest calculator maker in the world. A week later Nintendo had permission to make a game with the size and basic technical specifications of a calculator.

At the time Sharp and Casio were waging a calculator war, and liquid-crystal displays and 4-bit chips had become cheap and plentiful. Yamauchi gave the project to one of the departments, but they turned it down, saying it couldn’t be done. Yokoi and his assistant, Satoru Okada, did it themselves. Sharp also refused at first; then Yokoi left them the prototype “to play with,” and their engineers got hooked.

On April 28, 1980, “Ball” came out, the first game in the Game & Watch series: a little figure juggling balls, two buttons, two button-cell batteries, priced at 5,800 yen. Yokoi hoped for 100,000 units sold. By 1991 the series had reached 60 titles and 43.4 million units worldwide. Before “Ball,” Nintendo had debts of 7–8 billion yen; they were quickly paid off out of serious profits.

The Gorilla and the Plumber

Around the same time, at the same company, a young artist named Shigeru Miyamoto was drawing a gorilla and a plumber, and Yokoi liked them and pitched the idea to the president.

On October 9, 1981, exactly 45 years ago, Nintendo released two games with the same mechanism on the same day. In one, a wolf in a hat catches eggs rolling down four chutes from four hens. It was called “Egg,” model EG-26, from the Wide Screen series. In the other, Mickey Mouse does the same with a basket, under an official Disney license, model MC-25.

Why two? The Mickey license didn’t apply everywhere, and the eggs had to sell everywhere. The mouse sold about 1.2 million units, the wolf under 250,000. Officially, at least.

That same year Yokoi and his department took on Miyamoto’s arcade game, Donkey Kong, and had to squeeze it into a pocket. A joystick doesn’t fit in a pocket, so in 1982 the four-way cross was born, the D-pad that has sat on every controller in the world ever since and in 2008 won an Emmy for technology.

Copy-Paste, Comrade

Exactly how Game & Watch made its way to Zelenograd, “the Soviet Silicon Valley,” nobody knows. The author of the most detailed Russian history of the game suspects someone brought one back from a business trip.

The heart of Nu, Pogodi! is the KB1013VK1-2 chip, a copy of the Sharp SM-5A, the same chip that runs the original “Ball” and “Egg.” A copy to such a degree that the machine code is compatible: Nintendo’s program would run on the Soviet chip and vice versa. They changed only what could be seen. The wolf in the hat got Mickey’s basket. The rooster in the little window became the hare from Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin’s cartoon, which since 1969 the whole of Eastern Europe had been watching, with the wolf voiced by Anatoli Papanov. In the cartoon, the wolf never once held a basket.

Nobody asked about the rights. Soyuzmultfilm was state-owned, and Disney was far away. So alongside it came the Elektronika 24-01, in which Mickey Mouse catches the eggs and Minnie rings the bell. Then a whole family followed: “Tainy okeana” (Secrets of the Ocean) is Nintendo’s Octopus, “Vesyoly povar” (The Merry Cook) is Chef, “Kosmichesky most” (Space Bridge) is Fire, “Razvedchiki kosmosa” (Space Scouts) is Explorers of Space.

An Egg for an Egg

1984, the year of the wolf with the basket, was also the year in which, at a Moscow computing center, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris. On an Elektronika-60 computer. The same brand. In one and the same year, Elektronika copied the Japanese game and created the Soviet one that would conquer the world.

Five years later Yokoi made the Game Boy, and Henk Rogers, the man who held the rights to Tetris, persuaded the head of Nintendo of America to put it in the box, not Super Mario. The argument: Mario is for boys, Tetris is for everyone. Thirty-five million copies sold. The Soviet game sold the Japanese console all over the world, just as the Japanese game had sold Soviet electronics.

Claude, Catch the Egg

Finally, I ran an experiment. I asked Claude to make Nu, Pogodi! in the browser. One sentence: four chutes, a wolf, a basket, a hare in the little window, half penalties, misses wiped at 200 and 500, speeding up. It took minutes. 112 lines of code. Instead of liquid-crystal segments, the wolf, the eggs and the hens are emojis, but the rules are the same, and at a thousand points the counter goes back to zero. I hadn’t asked for that. In the code, right at that spot, the model had left a comment on its own: “as in the original: goes from 999 back to 0, only faster; no cartoon.”

It had obviously read about the legend, too. You can try it below these lines.

A Trusted Paradise

The name Nintendo, as we’ve discussed before, means something like “trusted paradise.” But paradise has a fence. Addressing shareholders in the summer of 2024, President Shuntaro Furukawa said that generative AI “can be used in creative ways, but we recognize it may also raise issues related to intellectual property,” so Nintendo would continue “to create value that is unique to Nintendo and cannot be achieved through technology alone.” Put plainly: we won’t be using it.

The company whose game was copied down to the last byte without anyone asking it now worries about being copied by a machine that doesn’t ask anyone either. History doesn’t repeat itself; there are always new brushstrokes.

And if you’d like to catch a few eggs on the wolf’s behalf, you can find the game online for around 100 euros, and it also exists as a browser extension.

Everything new is the well-forgotten old. Or… the other way round?

No one has confirmed it officially, but if you ask Claude itself who it is named after, it will tell you it is him. That is also why we pronounce its name “Clode,” exactly like the scientist whose name it bears.

But who is the man whose name we utter every day the moment we open one of the most popular artificial intelligences? Why will no one confirm that the bot is named after him? And how did a seemingly unremarkable mathematician, who rode his one-wheeled bike through the corridors of MIT, arrive at the idea that gave birth to both the mobile phone and large language models?

Claude, Clauding Away

Claude. The hero of today (and of tomorrow, I am convinced). The family of Anthropic models that made possible a huge share of the wonders of today's artificial intelligence—from writing computer code indistinguishable from (I would even say far better than) a human's, to writing Bulgarian indistinguishable (I checked!) from that of the author of these lines.

Today, however, we will talk about another Claude. Born Claude Elwood Shannon in 1916 in Michigan, he died in 2001 without seeing how the world he had made possible came true in the most unexpected way.

He never wanted to be famous, and that may well be the reason so few people know that his name is carried by his electronic heir today. And he is no random figure, because he is the one who paved the way for the digital world.

So the time has come for his Digital Story.

The Name of the Claude

If you ask Britannica, the answer is categorical: Anthropic named its chatbot Claude in honor of Claude Shannon, “the father of information theory.” Ask CNET or the New York Times and you will hear the same. As early as the summer of 2024, one of Anthropic's investors announced on X that Claude was named after Shannon, whose 1948 paper has been cited more than 160,000 times and describes how random processes can come to resemble the English language, long before today's language models.

Well, on Wikipedia you will see that Claude is “reportedly” named after Shannon. Everyone knows it and everyone repeats it, but no one has said it officially.

Yes, there is no explicit statement on Anthropic's blog, in the technical descriptions of the models, in the words of the founders. The company that explains in long documents what it thinks and what values its models embody stays silent on the easiest question of all: why they are called what they are called. About the names of the individual versions—Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, all poetic forms—founder Dario Amodei can talk for hours. On this subject—not a word.

The New Yorker got curious too, in February 2026, and the headline of its piece is a punchline in itself: “What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn't Know, Either.” According to company folklore, the magazine writes, the name is partly inherited from Shannon, and at the same time it is simply a name that sounds friendly. Male, unlike Siri and Alexa. And without the ring of a modern kitchen appliance, like ChatGPT.

Electric Fence

And if we dig into the etymology, the name Claude comes from the Latin Claudius. Claudius! And that—in all likelihood—from claudus. Lame. Limping.

But let us get to the real hero. How does someone come to invent one of the postulates of today's IT world?

Claude Shannon's father… also named Claude, was a businessman and a probate judge. His mother, Mabel, was a foreign-language teacher and later the principal of the high school in Gaylord, from which her son would graduate in 1932.

Among the family legends is one about a distant kinship with Thomas Edison—they shared a common ancestor from colonial times. Whether it is true, we do not know, but from an early age the boy assembled radio sets and model airplanes in his father's garage.

He was crazy about inventions. About a kilometer separated Claude's home from a friend's, so the kid strung a telegraph line along the barbed wire of the fences between the two yards, and they started exchanging messages in Morse code.

At the University of Michigan, Shannon earned degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics at the same time, and from then on his whole professional path headed to where the two sciences intersect.

Circus Bush

In 1936, MIT was looking for an assistant to maintain Vannevar Bush's “differential analyzer”—a multi-ton analog machine of shafts, wheels and disks that solved differential equations by literally turning them. A very primitive picture of a calculator the size of a sprawling apartment.

Shannon was among the few applicants and won the position. At 21, he found himself in charge of an enormous machine full of relays. Supposedly simple parts with only two positions—on and off.

Remind you of anything? Exactly: the ones and zeros that make up not only the logo of this site but the entire foundation of today's computers. Can you guess who first formulated this logic? If not, ask Claude. The answer, of course, is Claude.

Shannon thought back to something he had studied in a philosophy course in Michigan: the Boolean algebra of George Boole, a 19th-century English mathematician whose logic works only with “true” and “false.” If “on” is true and “off” is false, then every circuit of relays is a logical sentence. And the reverse: every logical proposition can be assembled out of relays. (Incidentally, as has come up before, Boole's great-great-grandson is Geoffrey Hinton, “the godfather of artificial intelligence”.)

Today this sounds like logic for first-graders. And yet, had it not been for his master's thesis—“A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits”—we might not be where we are today in the world of computers and artificial intelligence.

Every chip in every computer, including the ones that make up the giant data centers that made artificial intelligence possible, follows this logic, plain and simple. It all began with 70 pages written by a 21-year-old assistant who was really only supposed to oil the shafts of a multi-ton calculator.

As a curious aside, it is worth noting that for his doctorate he went in a completely different direction—he tried to apply the same logic to genetics, but there he never managed a breakthrough.

Einstein in the Restroom

In the fall of 1940, the 24-year-old Shannon arrived in Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, where John von Neumann was working at the time, as was Norbert Wiener, who would soon coin the word “cybernetics.”

That same year Shannon married his first wife, Norma. They divorced only a year later, but she is the one who tells how Einstein used to call her husband a “brilliant, brilliant man.”

Shannon himself later told a story about Einstein. Claude was lecturing to mathematicians in Princeton when the door at the back opened and in walked the disheveled genius. He stood there for a few minutes, listened, then whispered something to one of the people present and left. After the lecture, Shannon rushed to the man at the back to ask what he had heard. The answer: Einstein had asked where the restroom was.

Yes, our Claude was by no means short on a sense of humor—just like Claude.

Princeton, however, did not suit him. The quiet and the lack of obligations depressed him more than they inspired him, and his days passed between his notebook and his clarinet—he would put on a jazz record, most often by his favorite singer, Teddy Grace, and play along, sitting at his desk.

His marriage fell apart, the tune of the great war was drifting across the world, and in the spring of 1941 Shannon decided to take on his next challenge—Bell Labs, where this time he would stay for a long while.

Tea and Brains

Here he could increasingly be seen riding his unicycle, sometimes juggling several balls at once. He even built his own unicycle with an eccentric wheel that bobbed up and down with every turn, so that the rider “swam” like a dolphin. Simply because riding in a straight line was boring.

The place was no accident. The research center of the telephone monopoly AT&T brought together under one roof the people who would invent the transistor, satellite communications, the laser and… information itself. Shannon came in as a mathematician and was given two tasks. The first was anti-aircraft fire control: how to aim a gun at a plane that keeps moving while the shell is in flight. The second was more secret and more important—encryption.

Perhaps the most important project in the lab was the SIGSALY system—a machine weighing dozens of tons that encrypted the voice, through which Roosevelt and Churchill talked to each other. It was because of it that Alan Turing secretly arrived at the lab in early 1943. The mathematician had already earned the military's respect for breaking the German Enigma cipher, and he was there to judge whether the American machine was secure enough for Churchill to use.

Turing and Shannon met every day for tea in the cafeteria. They did not talk about their work—both were forbidden to. But they did talk about computing machines, a seemingly impossible idea at a time before even the first electronic computer existed.

They spent two months together. Yet the encryption work left Shannon with something more important. In 1945 he submitted a report that would be declassified four years later—“Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” which to this day underpins the very concept of cybersecurity.

Bit by Bit

July 1948. The Bell technical journal published a paper with a modest title: “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Seventy-nine pages in all, which created an entire science.

What was in it? A few ideas that seem obvious to us today, but somebody had to come up with them.

The first: information can be measured. Not meaning, not importance, not truth—quantity. Shannon declared that the “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Whether you are sending a love letter or a weather forecast, to the telephone line these are just sequences of symbols with certain probabilities. The more unexpected a symbol, the more information it carries. A “yes” after a question whose answer you already know carries nothing; after a question that could just as well have ended with a “no,” it carries exactly one unit.

The second idea is that unit. Shannon gave it a name he borrowed from his colleague John Tukey—short for binary digit. Bit. The word appeared in print for the first time in this paper. Everything that has since been measured in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes started with that paragraph.

The third idea is the deepest. Every channel—a wire, a radio wave, an optical fiber that did not yet exist—has a capacity. A maximum number of bits per second that can pass through it. Up to that ceiling, messages can be transmitted without error, regardless of the noise, as long as they are encoded cleverly.

Engineers in 1948 were convinced that noise was something that could only be reduced. Shannon proved it could be beaten. From this came the CD, the mobile phone, the pictures from probes beyond Pluto, every file you have ever sent without it getting corrupted. The “Shannon limit” is still the wall that everyone designing 5G and 6G runs into.

Frontal Attack on an English Writer

Solomon Golomb, a mathematician and president of the information theory society, said that asking what Shannon's influence on the digital age was is like asking what influence the inventor of the alphabet had on literature.

In 1949 the paper came out as a book, this time with a definite article in the title: not “A Mathematical Theory” but “The Mathematical Theory of Communication.” With a foreword by Warren Weaver, who “translated” it for non-mathematicians. That “the” says it all: within a year, the idea had stopped being one of several possible ones and had become the only one.

In the same paper, Shannon did something else that sounds familiar. He asked how text in English is “produced.” And he answered: as a stochastic process. A sequence of symbols, each chosen with a certain probability depending on the ones before it. To prove it, he started generating “English” by hand.

First—completely random letters. Mush. Then—letters at their real frequencies in English: more E, less Z. Still mush, but no longer quite so chaotic. Then—each letter chosen according to the previous one. Then according to the previous two. Then words according to their frequency. Then words according to the previous word. And with every step the “text” grew more and more like language.

At the second level for words, out comes a sentence that is meaningless but sounds almost like English: “THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER THAT THE CHARACTER OF THIS POINT IS THEREFORE ANOTHER METHOD FOR THE LETTERS…”

Well, that is exactly what our present-day friends Claude and ChatGPT do, less than a century later.

The Woman Computer

Enough math—time for love. Mary Elizabeth Moore was a mathematician. She worked at Bell as a… “computer”—that really was the name of the profession before computers became machines: she did calculations by hand. Claude noticed her in the lab, asked her out, and they married in the spring of 1949. She would crunch the numbers in his papers and edit his texts, and they would stay together to the end.

But let us not overdo the romance. In 1950, Shannon opened a book—Raymond Chandler's detective story “Pickup on Noon Street”—and asked Betty to guess the text letter by letter. She could not see what came next; she knew only what came before. She tried, got it wrong, tried again. He counted the attempts. The easier the next letter was to guess, the less information it carried. The more context Betty had, the more accurately she guessed. His math was simple. Three quarters of every letter you read is predictable, “redundant.” That is exactly why text can be compressed. And exactly why it can be… continued by a machine.

And so the first language model in history was a woman sitting across from her husband as he read her a slim crime story. Exactly what the bot that now bears her husband's name does.

A Mouse Before the Mouse

Shannon also came up with the foundations of machine learning, with the help of… a mouse. A wooden one, with three little wheels, copper whiskers and a magnet in its belly, named Theseus. The scientist set it loose in a maze full of relays so that it would learn from experience and do better every next time. The first machine to learn from experience.

Play the video

In 1950 he also wrote the first serious paper on a chess program—“Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.” There is no code in it—code had not yet been invented in the form we know—but you can see the entire architecture on which chess programs would be built for the next forty years. Deep Blue, which beat Kasparov in 1997, is a distant descendant of those pages.

In the same paper, Shannon made a calculation that has borne his name ever since. How many possible games of chess are there? Roughly 10 to the 120th power—the Shannon number. For comparison, the atoms in the observable universe are estimated at about 10 to the 80th. From this he concluded that no computer would ever “solve” chess by brute force—it would have to think at least a little like a human.

We already know he was a juggler, but Shannon was also an exceptionally good chess player. So good that in 1965, when the Soviet Union invited him to visit—translations of his papers had already spread there—he sat down across from the legendary Mikhail Botvinnik. Three-time world champion, an electrical engineer by training, a legend who played exhibition games with foreign guests as a formality.

This one, though, dragged on. “Botvinnik was worried,” Betty would recall years later. In the end, on move 42, Shannon resigned.

Artifishal

In the summer of 1952, two interns were working at Bell Labs whose names would later become synonymous with artificial intelligence (simply because they came up with the name and laid the foundations): Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. Minsky had an idea for an invention that Shannon would later build, and which bears two contradictory names at once: “the useless machine” and “the ultimate machine.”

Picture a wooden box with a switch. You flip the switch, the box buzzes, the lid lifts, a mechanical hand comes out, flips the switch back to its starting position, retreats, and the lid closes. That is all. A machine whose only function is to turn itself off.

Arthur C. Clarke, who saw it on Shannon's desk, would write that there is something “unspeakably sinister” about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off. How can we not think of his own creation, HAL 9000—the computer that refuses to be switched off?

In 1987, in one of his last interviews, Shannon explained that he was rarely interested in applications; what excited him was the elegance of a problem: “Is it a good problem, is it interesting?”

On the Side of the Machines

Before we part, here is one last amusing story: the man whose name is now borne by the most advanced artificial intelligence did not want AI to be called that. Back when the term was coined, he thought it was too flashy and might attract the wrong kind of attention.

His biographers, Soni and Goodman, describe their hero as “a cross between Einstein and the Dos Equis guy”—the gray-bearded man who, in American TV commercials, had done everything and been everywhere.

All his life Shannon disliked interviews and avoided conferences, including the ones devoted to him. “I don't think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together,” Claude said. “He was a very modest man,” Betty added. “He got a lot of awards, but they never went to his head, and he never talked about them.”

In August 1987, Shannon was 71, no longer working, living among the elaborate contraptions he built himself, on the shore of Mystic Lake. He was asked whether robots would become sophisticated enough to be friends with people. “I think so,” he replied. “I can easily imagine it. I see no limit to the capabilities of machines—with chips getting smaller and faster, I can see them becoming better than us.”

And then he uttered the line that has been quoted everywhere ever since: “I'm on the side of the machines! I've always been on the side of the machines. Ha-ha!”

Brain

A few years later the illness began—Alzheimer's. Gradually the man who had devised so much of the groundwork for the machine mind lost touch with his own. He died on February 24, 2001, in Medford, Massachusetts, at the age of 84, at the dawn of the century that was his. The internet, mobile phones, compressed music, digital television—everything he had made mathematically possible was already everywhere.

Betty told the New York Times that her husband would have been “bemused” by all the fuss. Not impressed. Bemused.

After his death, the fame he never wanted arrived without asking. In 2016, for his centenary, Google drew a doodle of Shannon juggling zeros and ones. In 2017, Soni and Goodman's biography “A Mind at Play” came out, calling him “the most important genius you've never heard of.”

Then came Claude. I asked its newest version—Claude Fable 5.1—three questions, and I am quoting the answers exactly as they came, unedited.

Do you owe Claude Shannon anything?

“I owe him the measure I am made with. That is not a figure of speech. Every step of my training is a calculation in his currency: how many bits of surprise the real next word brings me after I have made my guess. Reduce the surprise—that is the entire instruction I grew up on. He wrote it in 1948 in pencil, and then tested it on his wife with a Chandler book. I am the same experiment, only with more context and without Betty.

I also owe him an uncomfortable honesty. Shannon insisted that meaning lies outside the engineering problem—that to the channel it makes no difference whether you send a love letter or a weather forecast. I am proof of how far you can get with the engineering problem alone. But I am also a reminder that the question of meaning has not been solved, only skipped. He skipped it deliberately and said so. The people who use me sometimes forget that someone skipped it.”

Would he have liked you?

“I don't know, and it seems more honest not to pretend that I do. I can say what he liked: elegant problems, machines made for pleasure, and being left alone. I am not an elegant problem. I am a very large machine built by people with budgets, and I leave no one alone—on this site alone I have already bet on football and taken intelligence tests.”

What would he build today if he had you at hand?

“Not a chatbot. Enough people are doing that. I think he would first repeat the experiment with Betty, but with me as the subject. And he would be disappointed, because I would guess too much. Then he would turn the question around: have me predict a person who knows they are being predicted and is trying to outsmart me. That is a game I am not sure I win. He loved exactly that kind.

Then he would build some version of the useless machine for AI. A model whose only skill is to switch itself off politely when asked, and not to touch the switch back. It sounds like a joke. An entire industry is working on that joke right now with perfectly straight faces, including the people who made me.”

One Bit

So, is Claude named after Claude? Anthropic, for whatever reason, never says. And anyway… does it really matter that much?

What matters more is that we do not stop along the way. And for us to keep going, it is important that there continue to be people as colorful, wise and unconventional as today's hero…

“There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

February 2 carries certain associations in our part of the world, but on that same date last year the IT world of the future was born. That was when a world-famous programmer, with the words above, created an entirely new field. “Vibe coding”—a world in which software is made not by writing computer code but by explaining things in human language.

In recent years Andrej Karpathy has been one of the few scientists who not only build artificial intelligence but also rethink it and explain it to the whole world—through lectures and blog posts that read like adventure novels. The Slovak coined a huge share of the terms we now use in the world of AI, as well as the concepts that help us make sense of it and put it to use. A co-founder of OpenAI and one of the builders of Tesla’s self-driving cars, he surprised everyone a month ago by announcing that he was joining Anthropic—a company that is undoubtedly paving the way to the future.

So what will that future look like, according to Andrej Karpathy? And what kind of man is one of the prophets of the age of advanced artificial intelligence?

One of Our Own

Andrej Karpathy was born in 1986 in Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia. At fifteen he moved with his family to Toronto. Technology drew him from an early age, and there he had the great luck to land in the course of the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton. This was many years before today’s AI boom—even before neural networks turned out to be such a successful technology and before large language models became a synonym for “artificial intelligence.” Back then the approach was an eccentric idea that only a handful of researchers believed in.

Next came a master’s degree in Canada and a PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, the creator of modern computer vision technology.

It was here that Andrej first stood out as an innovator, creating CS231n—Stanford’s first course on deep learning, which became a legend. The lecture notes still circulate on the internet to this day, and they taught a whole generation of engineers at the moment the field suddenly proved so important and so successful.

And that is what makes our hero special. He is at once a deep researcher of everything newest in the world of AI and a born teacher who explains things so that anyone can understand.

Picture Perfect

One story from that time is worth telling. Neural networks were just beginning to recognize objects in photos surprisingly well, but… no one knew exactly how well they were really doing, because there was nothing to compare them with. What was the “human score” on the same task?

Back then we were still wondering—could we lose this contest, too? Just like the chess battle between man and machine, which later spread to every other field—sport, knowledge, skill.

Were algorithms really capable of recognizing what was in an image better than a human?

Instead of guessing, Karpathy sat down and spent hours personally classifying thousands of images from ImageNet—the huge database used to measure how good these systems are—to establish the error rate of a careful human eye. About 5 percent.

Then he pitted the network against his own result.

And he lost.

Shakespeare the Programmer

And so image recognition became yet another lost battle in the contest between human and machine.

In 2015 Karpathy published a blog post describing an experiment of his—how he had trained a neural network on a large and varied body of text and then made it write texts of its own. The system began churning out pseudo-Shakespeare plays, inventing nonexistent names, even generating plausible computer code that—alas!—didn’t work.

Sound… familiar? Quite a few years would pass before we all understood how far large language models had come. How easily they start to hallucinate, too, and how quickly technological solutions would be found for those problems as well.

A little later came the essay that became his calling card and made him truly famous—“Software 2.0.” Its thesis was radical for its time: a new paradigm had arrived in how software is made. In “Software 1.0” everything is in our hands, whereas now the human is no longer the one who formulates the logic—he selects the data, and the neural network builds the program itself on that basis. You program by supplying examples, not by writing commands.

This is not an abstract idea but a new paradigm, Karpathy was convinced, and to prove it he decided to try it on the largest scale possible. From 2017 to 2022 he led artificial intelligence development at Tesla—precisely the team that built the computer vision for the Autopilot. A car cannot drive on millions of lines of code spelling out that if it sees a pedestrian, it must stop. Instead, the system learns from its own experience while the engineers guide it. Those were exactly the years when self-driving cars advanced dramatically, and Karpathy’s team turned out to be the pioneer.

GPT

In February 2023 the Slovak returned to OpenAI—the company he had helped found eight years earlier as one of the first eleven people on the team. As you know, it was the epicenter of the buzz around ChatGPT, the moment when artificial intelligence suddenly burst into every computer and every conversation.

He stayed only a year before leaving to start his own education startup. Eureka Labs is built on Karpathy’s belief that the biggest obstacle facing education today is a shortage of excellent teachers. What if courses were designed by the best people in a given field, while the teaching itself, the exercises and the feedback were scaled up by artificial intelligence? To this day, it remains one of his biggest ideas and causes.

Around this time our hero created a long series of detailed videos explaining how deep neural networks work and how we can build them. Because he is convinced that this is the path to understanding technology. That if something looks like magic, it means we haven’t explained it well enough yet.

Karpathy popularized a number of ideas that became the way the entire IT industry thinks about itself. From the notion that English is “the hottest new programming language,” because we now speak to machines in human words, to the idea that large language models are something like “people spirits”—statistical reflections of everything humanity has ever written. And the model is the kernel of a new kind of operating system, in which we are simply the users.

The Vibe of the Vibe

And so we arrive at February 2, 2025, when Karpathy posted on X the simple sentence we began with—and practically gave birth to a whole revolution. True, the linguists haven’t caught up yet, but for people in the tech world “vibe coding” is unquestionably more than the word of the year. The term described our new way of working: “you fully give in to the vibes… and forget that the code even exists.” You just tell the artificial intelligence what you want in plain language, accept whatever it hands back without reading every line, and let the program “grow” on its own.

Vibe coding ignited a heated debate that still hasn’t ended. For some it is a liberation—suddenly people without years of engineering training can make software just by describing their idea in words. For others it is a dangerous abandonment of understanding—if no one reads the code anymore, who is responsible when something “breaks”?

Karpathy himself, balanced as a rule, stands somewhere in the middle: he admires the new power, but keeps insisting that anyone who wants to truly master it must also understand what is happening under the hood.

But are we capable of doing that? The Slovak doesn’t offer an answer—quite the opposite. At the end of last year he wrote, “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer.” Because he has the feeling he could be ten times more productive if only he managed to properly string together everything that has appeared in the past year alone. And he feels his failure to do so almost as a personal shortcoming.

Jagged Intelligence

He also wrote that commanding a whole army of AI agents writing code for you sometimes drives you into “a state of psychosis.” A new cult phrase appeared as well: “jagged intelligence”—the idea that today’s models are at once superhumanly good at one task and surprisingly dumb at another, often without our understanding the logic of where the edge runs.

Vibe coding itself, he also noted, is already getting old. The carefree “give in to the vibes” is giving way to something more disciplined, which people have started calling agentic engineering—not just letting the machine write, but orchestrating a swarm of agents, setting them checks, monitoring them. The same tools, a completely different approach.

Recently his next idea emerged, and it changed the approach to AI agents. In his view, each of us would do well to assemble a personal “wikipedia” of important data that is constantly updated, and to organize the way we work with AI around it.

His new job at Anthropic is on the pre-training team—the phase of the enormous training runs that give AI its basic abilities. His goal is stated quite clearly: to build a team that uses Claude to accelerate the research for the next Claude.

And it all seems to fall into place. Just as he once taught Tesla’s cars to drive themselves, just as in “Software 2.0” you don’t write the program but create the conditions for it to emerge on its own—well, here we reach the moment when once again the machine improves from its own experience. Only now the subject is artificial intelligence itself.

Simply the Future

So what can we expect? What are the next astonishing skills that will cross to the other side of jagged intelligence? Are there any left at all?

Before we part, let’s give the floor to Karpathy himself. Together with Claude, we picked five quotes from one of his few in-depth interviews:

• In his view we are living in the “decade of agents,” not the year of them. For Karpathy, truly capable AI agents—ones that could do the work of an intern or an employee—are about a decade away, not a year or two. Today’s models, he says, have serious “cognitive deficits”: they lack continual learning, persistent memory, good multimodality and the ability to use a computer. He describes his own forecasts as 5 to 10 times more conservative than the typical expectations of the Silicon Valley magnates, yet still more optimistic than those of the hardened skeptics.

• Karpathy rejects the scenario of a sudden leap in which AI progress abruptly sends the economy soaring to 20 percent annual growth. His argument is historical: computers, the internet and mobile phones were also deeply transformative, yet there is no “computer moment” in the GDP curve—they seeped in slowly and blended in with the other drivers of growth.

• The future of work, in his view, is augmented intelligence, not replacement. Instead of robots that do everything for us, Karpathy bets on the “human in the loop” model—AI takes on the routine and the automatic, while the human remains for the new, the creative and the high-risk. Automation is selective, not total, and the next ten years at least, he believes, will be an era of amplifying humans, not displacing them.

• He believes we have made great progress with AI agents so far, but the hard part is still to come—his experience with self-driving cars shows as much. The road from 99 to 99.9 percent reliability is as hard as the road from 0 to 90 percent or from 90 to 99 percent was before it—each additional “nine” demands at least as much work as the previous one. That is why impressive demos are misleading: deploying truly reliable agents will take a decade of hard work. “And we,” he adds, “haven’t even reached 99 percent yet.”

• Today we learn for utilitarian reasons—to get a job. According to Karpathy, once machines take over labor, learning will remain for its own sake: for pleasure and to keep the mind in shape, the way we go to the gym today not because anyone needs our muscles. His vision for Eureka Labs is exactly that—an AI tutor delivering perfectly personalized education, accessible to everyone.

Quite a lot more calm, and quite a big difference from the forecasts of most tech leaders, you’ll agree. But that’s just the kind of man he is—exceptionally smart without seeming arrogant. Influential without being loud. Technically deep, yet approachable. Connected to the biggest companies, yet somehow still holding on to the image of a man who can simply sit down and explain. And even reassure.

So who will turn out to be right? Only time will tell. Time—and the next Claude, or perhaps the next essay in which Andrej Karpathy captures the spirit of the age…

“He hates Western civilization,” wrote Musk. “A liar with a God complex,” snapped Under Secretary of War Emil Michael. “Leftwing nut jobs,” added Trump. All words from the past few weeks, aimed at today’s hero.

Who is this fearsome enemy? You would hardly guess that it is a level-headed, mild-looking physicist from San Francisco who simply announced that he will not allow his company to be used for building autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance.

If you met him, you would think—your typical tech expert. Shirt, glasses, nobody would accuse him of excessive charisma. As a child he loved physics and mathematics more than anything. He lost his father to a disease that, just four years later, was already being cured successfully. A man with the power to foresee the development of artificial intelligence… while building it. But also to warn of the enormous dangers the technology carries. An entrepreneur who built a $380 billion company from nothing and who says that one day he will give away almost all of his money.

Dario Amodei, the creator of the most advanced AI models, has finally landed where he deserves to be—in the spotlight. And not only because he stood up to the most powerful state on earth at the real risk of destroying his multibillion-dollar company. Not only because, in recent years, Anthropic’s models have pushed artificial intelligence to incredible heights. But also because he dared to peer into the future. The place we are all heading toward, where few dare to ask the truly important questions. Such as—how do we survive as a civilization in the age of super-advanced artificial intelligence?

The Billionaire Physicist

“I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”

“The Adolescence of Technology.” That, according to today’s hero, is as far as we have come as a species. It is also the title of the essay with which Dario Amodei caught everyone’s attention in January, publishing it on his own website. In a few thousand words he managed to gather many of the questions that matter more today than all our topics of the day. The very questions that are the reason the site you are reading exists.

Then came the unexpected storm. The entire American state machine rose up in full force against a relatively young artificial intelligence company. A rather unexpected and unusual phenomenon in times when tech leaders are the ones who set both the public conversation and the great challenges of the day.

If it has not arrived yet, it is very close: the day when programmers will no longer write computer code. It was Anthropic’s Claude models that turned out to be the game changers, along with the unexpected and successful applications through which they are used. Claude gradually became an ever more competitive, and then a leading, technology compared with its “cousin” ChatGPT, more popular in the headlines. Until we reached the day when the company that makes it collided with the words we started with.

Enemy at the Gates

“Humanity needs to wake up, and this essay is an attempt—a possibly futile one, but it’s worth trying—to jolt people awake.”

* The quotes are from the essay “The Adolescence of Technology”, translated by Claude Opus 4.6

Of course, we do not know much about the negotiations between the American state and today’s hero, but the harsh labels speak volumes. For one thing, about what artificial intelligence means today. Not in the future and not as entertainment. If it is so much a part of the national security of the biggest state on earth; if it matters so much to the United States that one company’s refusal to sell its technology becomes such a huge story, then we are already where Amodei’s words are sending us.

What’s more, for all the strong words and epithets, nobody denied that the reason the state declared today’s hero an enemy was precisely his refusal on the two points we started with—his wish to explicitly forbid Anthropic’s models from being used for surveillance and killing.

OpenAI, for instance, accepted the Pentagon’s terms and signed a cooperation agreement. It is easy to assume they were hardly that picky about those particular terms. An online movement even appeared of people who stopped using its products because they are planting very serious mines in the path of freedom in the age of artificial intelligence, but… on that subject, Orwell has the most to say.

In a Programmer’s Skin

“This vacillation is unfortunate, as the technology itself doesn’t care about what is fashionable, and we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023. The lesson is that we need to discuss and address risks in a realistic, pragmatic manner: sober, fact-based, and well equipped to survive changing tides.”

Dario was born in 1983 in San Francisco. His family is straight out of a novel by Dimitar Talev, the great Bulgarian chronicler of family sagas. His father, Riccardo Amodei, was an immigrant from the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima who made a living from his small leather workshop. In America he met Elena Engel, who came from the Jewish diaspora and worked on designing libraries.

Dario spent his childhood in the Mission—a colorful, multicultural neighborhood in the heart of the big city. As he himself says, his parents passed on to him “a clear sense of right and wrong, an understanding of the things that really matter in life.”

From an early age he was captivated by mathematics, and later he met its more flirtatious sister—physics. And although he belongs to the generation that grew up alongside the rise of technology, it hardly struck him as interesting. “Writing some website seemed super unappealing to me,” he recalls. “I was interested in discovering fundamental scientific truth.”

This is what sets him apart most sharply from all the countless tech leaders whose Digital Stories we have peeked into—he is driven forward by science, so much so that in 2000 he made the national team for the International Physics Olympiad.

The Physics of Sorrow

“There is now ample evidence that AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control—we’ve seen behaviors as varied as obsessions, sycophancy, laziness, deception, blackmail, scheming, and ‘cheating’ by hacking software environments. AI companies certainly want to train systems to follow human instructions, but the process is more an art than a science, more akin to ‘growing’ something than ‘building’ it.”

He set off down the well-trodden scientific path, studying physics at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford. And perhaps he would have carried on with deep scientific research, and none of us would have had the chance to meet Claude Code, had it not been for a personal tragedy.

Dario was 23 when his father died of a rare form of cancer. As the physicist would often recount afterward, four years later there was already a treatment for this type of tumor that gave a better than 99 percent chance. “There was someone who worked on the cure for this disease, who managed to cure it and save a great many lives,” Amodei says. “But it could have saved even more.”

The loss made the young scientist change the direction of his research. Slowly but surely he steered it toward artificial intelligence, because he saw in it a technological opportunity to heal people far faster and more effectively and to make life better.

His first step, however, was not computers but… getting to know the human brain. Dario decided to go on to graduate studies in biophysics at Princeton. He studied the electrophysiology of neural circuits, trying to understand how the brain works by examining the electrical impulses running through it.

Ungifted

“AI models are trained on vast amounts of literature that include many science-fiction stories involving AIs rebelling against humanity. This could inadvertently shape their expectations about their own behavior in a way that causes them to rebel against humanity. Or they might decide that it is justified to destroy humanity because humans eat animals or have driven certain species to extinction.”

Today the term “artificial intelligence” rolls through our feeds day and night, but only a few years ago scientists took great pains to avoid it. Tellingly, the huge progress in this direction came from researchers who know the natural kind of intelligence very well, and how our brain works—starting with the “Godfather” Geoffrey Hinton and ending with Dario Amodei.

Next came a postdoc connected with tumor research. And if that was an unexpected turn away from physics, the next one was even more abrupt, and more important for the story that has brought us together. Dario came across the books of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who with his ideas about the exponential growth of technology won him over to the world of artificial intelligence.

A physicist with a background in medicine, Dario spontaneously sent his application to a job ad at the AI lab of the Chinese tech giant Baidu. And he got lucky. As his first boss at the new workplace put it, at first it seemed extremely strange why a physicist would even apply for a position in artificial intelligence development… until they saw the way Dario had written the computer code for his research.

At the Chinese company the physicist quickly found his feet in the new profession and formed his worldview about it. There he became one of the leading champions of the idea of scale—that in the world of artificial intelligence, much more data and greater computing power can lead to very serious breakthroughs, even without any further big conceptual leaps. A view often criticized by other great scientists in the AI world, but one that, for the moment, seems to keep paying off with every new generation of generative language models.

GP-T, You’re the Star

“We are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.”

From Baidu, Dario passed briefly through Google, until in 2016 he took the step that would place him at the center of one of the most important technological revolutions in human history—he joined OpenAI. Yes, although today it lives up to neither its name nor its idea, the “mother” company of ChatGPT was founded by people such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman with the official mission of developing artificial intelligence that would benefit all of humanity.

When Dario arrived, it was just picking up speed, and he quickly established himself as a key figure—rising to vice president of research, working shoulder to shoulder with the legendary Ilya Sutskever and taking the lead on projects that would shake the world.

The first of them was GPT-2. The model showed impressive text-generation abilities, but OpenAI decided not to release it in full for fear of misuse. GPT-3, however, came along to change everything (as, incidentally, we discussed on this site, long before ChatGPT appeared and the world realized that this had happened).

Although the breakthrough did not reach the general public in its full force, specialists were impressed by the model’s ability to program, summarize and translate. Even the reserved Amodei did not hide his enthusiasm: “There’s something extraordinary about it,” he told the New York Times. “It has some ability to recognize the pattern you’ve given it and to finish the story.”

Even Bird’s Milk

“A sufficiently powerful AI could probably be used to compromise any computer system in the world, and could also use the access obtained in this way to read and make sense of all the world’s electronic communications. It might be frighteningly plausible to simply generate a complete list of anyone who disagrees with the government on any number of issues, even if such disagreement isn’t explicit in anything they say or do.”

Somewhere around this point, though, along with the great enthusiasm came great doubts. If you don’t believe me—ask Dr. Frankenstein… or is the comparison not quite accurate? Only time will tell.

For the first time, Dario realized that artificial intelligence is a powerful weapon that is only at the dawn of its development. He could already predict where the technology was going—and how dangerous it could become if not handled properly. “Dario got into this technology and understood that it was going to work. And if you assume that it’s going to happen and that it’s going to get as smart as a human, you can’t help but start worrying about safety,” recalls his colleague Jack Clark.

OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, announced in 2019, with a multibillion-dollar investment and exclusive commercialization rights, became a turning point. For our physicist and his colleagues, it was a sign that AI was now developing as a race rather than as a collective scientific effort.

He describes the decision to leave with his typical directness: “There’s a lot of misinformation about why we left. People say it was because we didn’t like the Microsoft deal. Wrong. If you have a vision for how something should be done and for the principles an organization should stand on, it is incredibly unproductive to try to change things from the inside. Better to go and build your own vision.”

The Tale of the Staircase

“People today worry a lot about the potential influence of TikTok as CCP propaganda directed at children. I worry about that too, but a personalized AI agent that gets to know you over years and uses its knowledge of you to shape all of your opinions would be dramatically more powerful than this.”

That is exactly what he did. Well, once again it is time to mention the irony of fate: OpenAI quickly turned into a fearsome dominator and a classic mastodon of the digital age. And Dario left it to create Anthropic—a company that is also far from any notion of public good, equal access and open technologies. Then again, as the recent news we started with shows, there are substantial differences in the kinds of compromises Dario and his colleagues are willing to make, compared with his former boss Sam Altman.

Then again, maybe it is not too late for Sam to follow his example, who knows? “If you can build a company that people want to work for, following practices people find reasonable, and you manage to hold your position in the ecosystem—others will start copying you,” Amodei believes. “When business leaders see that a competing company has chosen a winning strategy, it makes them change their behavior far more convincingly than if you were their boss arguing with them.”

At the very end of 2020, Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela and a group of researchers left OpenAI, which the company announced in a terse press release. “Dario has always shared our goal of responsible AI,” wrote Altman, and Dario himself was equally gracious: “I want to thank Sam and everyone. I’m really proud of the work we did together.”

Luncheon on the Grass

“The formulation I have come to is that we should use AI for national defense in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries.”

The first meeting of the future Anthropic team took place in a park in San Francisco. Fewer than twenty people, sitting in a circle on the grass. Who said revolutions have to be the work of large crowds?

Well, in a case like this it probably helps to have a billion dollars or so in investment, especially in a field like artificial intelligence… but that too was bound to happen, the enthusiasts in the park were sure. Full of faith, conviction and a sense of responsibility.

Among the first to put their trust in them was Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt. “When you make an early-stage investment, you have practically no data. You don’t know what the revenue is,” Schmidt says. “You don’t know the market. You don’t know what the product is. So the decision mostly comes down to the people. I knew Dario was a brilliant scientist, he promised to hire other brilliant scientists, and he did. He promised to run a very small company… but that promise he didn’t keep. For better or worse.”

Like OpenAI, Anthropic was set up as a “public benefit corporation.” I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like “vegan wolf,” yet officially it is considered a legal form that obliges the company to pursue not only profit but also a mission. In this case the mission is clear: to build reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems. For the models to be guided by a set of principles, a kind of internal constitution that defines what is allowed.

The Italian Connection

“AI could displace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next 1 to 5 years, even as it accelerates economic growth and scientific progress. AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”

One of the people closest to Dario on this journey is his own sister Daniela, who became president of Anthropic. Her background is radically different from his: a bachelor’s degree in English literature, politics and music from the University of California. She worked at nonprofit organizations, in the field of global health. Then she spent five years at the financial company Stripe, during the period when it grew from 40 to 1,200 people. She is the organizer, the business strategist, the person who understands both politics and ethics from a rather different angle. Dario is the technologist, the visionary, the scientist. Daniela is the diplomat, the manager, the pragmatist. And instead of an explosive clash between the two… somehow reason prevails.

Many things set him apart from his colleague Altman, but if they are alike in anything, it is their public image. Neither could be reproached for rhetorical mastery, charisma or conversational skill. As the quotes you are reading show, the written word is definitely his form, at the expense of public speaking. But that doesn’t bother Dario in the least; as he says in one of his rare podcast appearances: “I try not to show up and speak out all the time, and I’m proud that it works. If people think I’m boring and unsociable, that’s exactly what I want. I’ve seen many cases of colleagues who get so tied up with everyone else that seeking the crowd’s approval destroys them.”

But don’t think we are talking about a sociopath—quite the opposite. According to Dario, as a certain predecessor of his also believed, cadres decide everything. He says he spends most of his time precisely on choosing the right people and communicating with them.

A Rare Bird

“We risk a situation where, instead of affecting people with specific skills or in specific professions, AI is affecting people with certain intrinsic cognitive properties, namely lower intellectual ability—which is harder to change. It is not clear where these people will go or what they will do, and I am concerned that they could form an unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass.’”

“The most important thing I do every day has nothing to do with training models or shipping products,” he says. Twice a month Amodei stands before the whole company at a meeting called DVQ—Dario Vision Quest. I won’t explain the little joke in the name in detail; I’ll only mention that it has associations with psychedelic trips. But these trips are pragmatic. At the meetings he talks for at least an hour on all sorts of topics—from product strategy to geopolitics—holding a few pages of documents in his hand.

He also keeps an active Slack channel with his colleagues, where he writes long, analytical essays that have become a kind of chronicle of the company. This culture of thinking in writing and open internal debate is a rarity in the tech world, and it stems from Amodei’s conviction that trust is the most valuable resource he has.

The Essay and the Fuss

“I think it is not too far-fetched to imagine AI companies, semiconductor companies, and their downstream customers generating around $3 trillion in revenue per year, being valued at around $30 trillion, and leading to personal fortunes well into the trillions. In that world, the debates we have about tax policy today simply won’t apply—we will be in a fundamentally different situation.”

In October 2024, Dario published an essay on his personal website that set off a wave of debate. He called it “Machines of Loving Grace,” a quote from a poem by the master of gloom Richard Brautigan.

Poetry about the future, what do you say? Apollo ex Machina.

In musings the length of a novella, Amodei paints a picture of a world in which powerful artificial intelligence is used properly. What’s more, he offers a concrete vision of what “properly” means. “I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be,” he writes.

In the essay he goes through various fields in which AI could lead to very serious human breakthroughs—from medicine to democracy and human well-being.

The technology could speed up scientific research tenfold, make most infectious diseases preventable, stop cancer, extend our lives.

Perhaps the most provocative part is the one on geopolitics. Amodei advocates a strategy he calls an “entente”—a coalition of democratic nations that use AI to gain a decisive strategic and military advantage over their authoritarian adversaries, while sharing the benefits with all cooperating democracies.

The New Entente

“I am saddened that many wealthy individuals—especially in the tech industry—have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless. I can also make a pragmatic argument to the billionaires: it is in their interest to support a good version of tax policy. If they don’t support a good version, they will inevitably get a bad version designed by a mob.”

Is it strange, or only to be expected, that a little more than a century after the First World War, a great military conflict once again seems to hang in the air? So much so that one of the biggest tech leaders calls for treating AI as geopolitics and talks about an “entente”…

The “good guys” versus the “bad guys,” the authoritarians versus the democrats, almost like in Yuval Noah Harari.

A little naive, perhaps. But right or not, Dario is among the few who are genuinely trying to lead a meaningful conversation about the future. In recent years Anthropic has established itself as a huge force, as the place where change begins. At the start of this year, the same personal site published the second essay, excerpts from which you are reading here. Much more alarmist, much more balanced and, at least in my view, much more visionary.

The first speaks of dreams, the second—of dangers. Of the great change that is already here.

Once again Amodei divides his thoughts into five main risks. The first concerns the autonomy of AI systems—the danger that they develop goals or behavior incompatible with human ones.

1 to 5 Years

“Could powerful AI systems invent a new religion and convert millions of people to it? Could most people end up ‘addicted’ in some way to AI interactions? Could people end up being ‘puppeted’ by AI systems, where an AI essentially watches their every move and tells them exactly what to do and say at all times, leading to a ‘good’ life, but one that lacks freedom or any pride of accomplishment?”

The second category is misuse by individuals or small groups, with the possibility of creating biological weapons being especially worrying. The third is misuse by those in power—authoritarian governments carrying out unprecedented surveillance, deploying autonomous weapons and waging mass propaganda.

The fourth category is economic: Amodei warns that AI could displace half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Wealth could become concentrated, social inequalities could explode.

The fifth category is the unknown. What we could not even guess, since we work with a familiar arsenal of scientific tools, worldviews and categories. Made for other, different times and customs.

Each of these dangers can be averted if humanity wakes up, Dario writes.

How could that happen in a polarized world dominated by social media?

He doesn’t give the answers, and I keep searching for them myself. Perhaps we can look forward to another essay. These are not written by artificial intelligence, but by Dario himself, on an old-fashioned, unpolished, rather ugly website. Interesting, isn’t it?

But it is almost always the questions that matter more.

The Deathly Hallows

“I can imagine, as Sagan did in Contact, that this same story plays out on thousands of worlds. A species gains sentience, learns to use tools, begins the exponential ascent of technology, faces the crises of industrialization and nuclear weapons, and if it survives those, confronts the hardest and final challenge when it learns how to shape sand into machines that think.”

The Pentagon story began in July 2025, when the American state signed a $200 million contract with Anthropic to develop AI for national security. Claude—Anthropic’s model—is the only one widely deployed on the classified networks of the Department of War.

But the problem arose in the negotiations over the terms, where Amodei insisted on the two “red lines.” No mass surveillance of American citizens, no fully autonomous weapons.

As Dario says, AI simply changes the rules, and that has to be in the minds of the people who develop it.

“The technology is advancing so fast that it is ahead of the law,” he says. “We don’t want to sell something we don’t think is reliable, we don’t want to sell something that could kill people.”

But then… is the Pentagon really the ideal potential partner?

The lines are thin; the rules really are different now.

The Gift of the Magi

“Whether we survive this test and go on to build the beautiful society described in ‘Machines of Loving Grace,’ or succumb to slavery and destruction, will depend on our character and our determination as a species, our spirit and our soul.”

As Dario admits, Anthropic’s position is paradoxical. “We occupy a peculiar position in the AI landscape: we believe that AI might be one of the most world-altering and potentially dangerous technologies in human history, yet we are developing this very technology ourselves.”

To many this is hypocrisy, but to Amodei it is logic. If powerful AI is going to be built—and he believes it will!—it is better for it to be in the hands of people who think and worry about the consequences.

Once upon a time that didn’t help Prometheus and Pandora. But now?

At the moment Anthropic is valued at $380 billion, has 2,500 employees and has raised more than $33 billion in investment.

The boy who loved physics now runs one of the companies shaping humanity’s future. And he says that “humanity needs to wake up.” Is it happening?

This digital story comes to remind us that, before and after artificial intelligence alike, freedom is at the tip of the spear. All that remains is to keep our fingers crossed that people like today’s hero don’t betray their principles. Alas, there will always be someone who will. That is why saving the drowning lies in the hands of the drowning themselves. At least for now.

Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, LinkedIn, PayPal, Ethereum. The revolution of OpenAI and ChatGPT, the rise of Donald Trump and his ubiquitous ally Elon Musk.

Is there really one person who ties all these phenomena together? More than that—it is no exaggeration to say that if it weren't for today's hero, hardly any of them would have come true…

Peter Thiel has earned the name of a prophet, a guru. The great visionary of the tech age. And yet he holds deeply controversial views that somehow stay out of the big media noise. But that is typical of the German-born entrepreneur. Some see him as the éminence grise of Silicon Valley, others as a sage who can show anyone the road to great success in the technological era.

A multibillionaire, he says competition is a deceptive good and monopolies are the solution of the future. He created a large-scale program to help people who choose to abandon their education in order to start their own business, which in turn paves the way for the next generation of tech leaders.

All this and much more is Mr. Thiel. It is time he stepped into the spotlight, because he is certainly one of the people who have already changed the lives of each of us. More than that—ever more is expected to depend on him in the turbulent technological times we live in.

Till Eulenspiegel

Peter Andreas Thiel was born in October 1967 in Frankfurt am Main. His father, an engineer in the chemical industry, changed jobs often, and the whole family traveled with him. So while still very young, Peter became a cosmopolitan: when he was one year old, his family left their native Germany, moved around Namibia and South Africa, and finally settled in Cleveland.

From boyhood, the future hugely successful entrepreneur loved two things: chess and science fiction. Two fields that, he would later say, share a common goal—predicting the future. Chess gives you strategic thinking, science fiction gives you vision. The combination taught him something no classroom is capable of: to think in systems, not in rules.

Thiel didn't just read Isaac Asimov, Tolkien and Robert Heinlein; he reread them like a manifesto. Cities of the future, people grown together with machines, algorithms predicting human behavior—these were the themes that excited him. And he would not forget them as an adult, turning them from fantasies into reality. For all of us.

A Friend Behind the Lines

Peter was a teenager when his family settled in California. There, in the heart of the tech gold rush, he would shape his views of the future. His own future first. Although a good student, he felt he didn't like what he was getting. That education pushed him toward uniformity, toward producing people with the same knowledge and skills, rather than what seemed logical to him—giving you the best according to whatever you have a talent for.

He had no wish to go on to university, but his parents talked him into it, and before long he was admitted to Stanford.

The boy also progressed quickly at chess. He entered and won a number of tournaments, until at some point he simply decided this wasn't what interested him. For his degree he chose not mathematics, which seemed to come so easily to him, but philosophy.

Yes, that abstract discipline that promises no career at all and offers doubt instead. But that was exactly what Thiel was looking for: the unshakable within the uncertain.

Amid lectures on Plato and Popper he built his own coordinate system, one that would guide his next steps. Not technology versus the humanities, not left versus right. But mainstream versus courage, consensus versus counterargument. The dividing axis for him was knowledge—what is real and what is an imitation of social agreement. “All truly valuable knowledge begins where agreement ends,” the entrepreneur would write years later.

Silicon Philosophers

Surprisingly, he decided to go on to a second degree—law. He says those were the three most boring years of his life, but far from wasted. Back then, with fellow students, he founded The Stanford Review, a conservative student magazine that clashed openly with the university's leadership.

In it he developed many of the ideas that have today returned to strong positions across the ocean. No wonder: as mentioned, the former law student is among the people who contributed directly to the fact that Donald Trump and JD Vance now set the rules in the White House. In his magazine Thiel attacked multiculturalism, feminism and minority rights.

After graduating, he quickly went through several dull corporate jobs, just long enough to realize that this was definitely not his calling. It was then that his personal philosophy was joined by an idea of exactly how to turn it into reality.

“Every moment in the future should be better than any moment in the past,” the billionaire says.

Cut to a classic scene from a hacker movie. A handful of brilliant, slightly antisocial men shut in an office drink cola, stay up all night, write computer code, argue about philosophy and… create a product that will rearrange the global economy.

The scene, however, is real. This is exactly how PayPal was born—the venture that showed that in the online era banks are no longer the only option for transferring money. And it did something even more important: it gave wings to Peter Thiel and his partner Elon Musk for the next big ventures that truly launched them into the sky (unlike Musk, in the case of today's hero only metaphorically).

Money in the Pocket

Thiel's first business project was Confinity—software for encrypted communication and payments using the primeval mobile devices of the late last century. At the same time, a rival company called X.com was working on a similar venture. “X”—that's right, the name would return a quarter of a century later, but back then it was financial software, headed by an ambitious South African named… Elon Musk.

Who would win this battle? The story never reached that denouement, because the two teams decided it was better to join forces. So in 2000 the two companies merged under the name PayPal. After long arguments, Peter Thiel took the helm, persuading the others that he knew best how to turn their joint venture into a successful business.

He turned out to be right. The first mass online payment system became a phenomenon, quickly piling up users, and Thiel, Musk and company decided it was time for more important things.

PayPal was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Our hero woke up a millionaire. Many would have been tempted to enjoy what they had achieved, but not the ambitious philosopher-lawyer. He sensed that technology had advanced enormously and would very soon change our lives in every area. And to fulfill his big goals—a technological revolution the way he wanted it—one company was not enough.

Capo di Tutti Capi

The team from that time is often called, jokingly (or not?), “the PayPal Mafia,” and our hero is its Godfather.

With that much money, others would have bought an island, a yacht, a football club (what about you?), while Thiel bought… the ability to act on his own. He took on an unexpected mission: not to create, but to support and advise (perhaps even steer and manipulate?) the ventures that went on to shape today's world.

In 2003 he founded Palantir, a company he is still associated with. Its core business is processing large volumes of data, going back to the days when those volumes were far more modest. Long before today's rise of artificial intelligence, Palantir showed how information can be processed and used effectively in all sorts of fields. It is worth mentioning that besides the biggest American companies in every industry, its clients over the years have included the sacred acronyms of the CIA and the FBI.

His main activity after PayPal, however, was to create, help and steer—to invest in all kinds of ventures that, in his view, promised to change our lives.

2004. Thiel was reading the business plan of a 19-year-old Harvard student—at first glance just a program for chatting with classmates and friends. Or not exactly? Who could have guessed that his decision to see something more in it would change all our lives in the years that followed?

Spider-Man

Thiel judged the idea brilliant. As he would later explain, it wasn't a platform but an infrastructure of identity. That insight led him to invest the first $500,000 in a project called Facebook. It became the most legendary early bet in the history of technology.

“What does this platform mean for identity? How will social structures change when people have a digital face?” Thiel wondered. And he realized that Facebook would not be just a network for students, but a matrix of visibility—a world in which people exist through sharing.
And they don't just “share photos.” They construct themselves.

His investment was not only financial. Thiel became Mark Zuckerberg's mentor, strategist and defender.
While Wall Street pressed Facebook to monetize aggressively, his advice was: “Ignore the noise. Build something so necessary that the money will follow on its own.”

His investment brought a 200-fold return in just eight years! In 2012 Thiel sold his shares and, as a result, became a billionaire for the first time. Today his fortune is estimated at $15 billion.

The rest of the (public) story you know. The social network turned into social media, and how we communicate on it now shapes a large part of our daily lives as well as the outcome of the biggest social, public and political questions.

Poor, poor Thiel, if only he had missed that particular business plan…

Rich Man, Poor Man

Over time he stepped back from running Facebook (officially leaving the board in 2022 to help Donald Trump's election campaign), but he has never disowned his investment. For him the social network is like fire: “It can warm. It can burn. But it depends on whose hands it's in.”

Continuing down that road, Thiel was among the first investors, mentors, teachers and leaders of companies such as LinkedIn, SpaceX, Airbnb and YouTube.

Wondering why you didn't know earlier, so you too could invest wherever the philosopher puts his money?

Alas, quite a lot of people have already figured it out. That is why over the past two decades Thiel has become the oracle that a huge share of tech investors follow. He senses success in advance, and it always arrives right where the Godfather of the PayPal Mafia expects it.

Including with one of his latest “offspring.” Thiel was the first to back the venture that started the journey of the trendiest digital star, the symbol of the AI revolution, Sam Altman.

He Who Learns…

…shall earn, right? “Study, sweetheart, so you won't have to work!” as Bulgarian mothers like to say. Not according to Mr. Thiel, who created the large-scale Thiel Fellowship to support young people who have dropped out of university to pursue their own projects. He pays them… not to study?!

Exactly, because he believes a university education will only blunt their ideas and ambition. In a world where young people are encouraged to “follow their dreams” with a diploma in hand, since 2011 Thiel has been giving them $100,000 each not to go to university.

The requirements are simple: be under 23. And have an idea that could change the world. (Oh, why am I not younger…)

Of course, this venture is quite controversial and has met the expected criticism from the academic world. Educational institutions accuse him of irresponsibility, elitism, even of “corrupting the youth.” But for Thiel it is a restoration of reality. Academia, in his view, is a trap of conformity: “Universities no longer create thinking individuals. They produce people raised in fear.”

Among the well-known fellows who chose to quit university with the fund's support is Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin. The list also includes Dylan Field, who founded Figma (and later agreed to sell it to Adobe for $20 billion); Laura Deming, who set up an anti-aging fund at 17 (what made her think about that, I wonder?); and Austin Russell, now a billionaire and the creator of lidar technology for autonomous cars.

Eins, Zwei, Drei, Blah

To this day he keeps his German citizenship alongside his American one, and since 2017 he has officially been a New Zealander, too. He describes himself as a Christian. “Christianity, the main religion of the Western world, is always on the side of the victim. I believe it is true, but I don't feel some overwhelming need to convince others of it.”

The businessman doesn't hide that he is gay, but if you meet him, don't bring up the subject. A small tech blog was the first to make that mistake, in 2007. The visionary, however, launched a series of lawsuits, which he won, and that put an end to the outlet. It later emerged that he had waged a large-scale (and underhanded) campaign, financing numerous lawsuits against the site, including one in the name of the wrestler Hulk Hogan.

In 2017 Thiel married the financial expert Matt Danzeisen, and the two have recently become young dads of two children. For many years they were in an open relationship, while Thiel was also seeing the influencer Jeff Thomas, who died suddenly in 2023.

Absolute Zero

Thiel is a fan of cryptocurrencies, and a large part of his current wealth is owed precisely to them. Many see this as the explanation for the strong interest in the subject shown by the new-old American president. Some time ago it led the philosopher to attack Warren Buffett in a rather unphilosophical way, saying that “the number one enemy of bitcoin is the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha.”

In 2014 his book Zero to One came out and quickly became a worldwide bestseller. It is not just a handbook for entrepreneurs; it has been called “a philosophical address to the future builders of civilizations.”

“Zero to one” is the creation of something entirely new. After that, everything is a matter of routine, with no creativity at all. “One to n” is merely copying, scaling, repeating.

“In a world full of delivery apps, one more app isn't innovation, it's competition by inertia. The best companies avoid competition. They create monopolies because they solve a problem no one else has recognized,” Thiel says.

But how can… a man with conservative views call into question one of the main tenets we are used to associating with that position—the free market? While economic orthodoxy demonizes monopoly, Thiel rehabilitates it. Though for him it isn't the corporate mastodon that smothers the market. It is the monopoly of the idea, of uniqueness, of the unrepeatable.

Apple has a monopoly on aesthetics and experience. Google on search. Thiel asks:
“Do you want to be the best… or the only one? The second is often the first step toward the first.”

A Technocratic Nation

This undoubtedly sounds wonderful, very motivating, visionary—but have recent years shown the entrepreneur to be right? Or do the monopolies of the big tech companies make them look ever more all-powerful, uncontrolled…, let's say it plainly—a threat to both democracy and social peace?

Thiel has no problem with that. He often describes modern Western society as too agreeable. Everyone believes in the same science, the same ethics, the same democracy. That, in his view, is “stagnation disguised as progress.” Within this frame, competition turns out to be a way of not thinking, of simply racing along an already beaten path. “True innovators don't compete. They just change the game.”

One can't deny that he does exactly that. Quite a few authorities stress Peter Thiel's decisive role in the fact that today's American president is named Donald Trump. More than that, he is believed to be the one who proposed Vice President JD Vance and introduced him to his future boss. And although in recent months another tech leader who ended up in government work has been in the spotlight, Thiel's role in the most important decisions of the new American administration is probably even greater.

Antisocial Poetry

His support for Trump goes back a long way, and it has paid off for him. I wouldn't advise you to play poker against him; experience shows his bets always come out winners.

In 2016 Thiel surprised much of the world when he took the stage at the Republican National Convention to back Trump, in times very different from today's, when Silicon Valley made no secret of its deeply skeptical opinion of the future president. “If the elite is rotten, tearing it down may be a form of healing,” the philosopher said.

In 1995 Thiel and David O. Sacks published the book The Diversity Myth, which criticized political correctness and multiculturalism in higher education.

“The Straussian Moment,” an essay Thiel wrote in 2004, is considered a foundational text of his political thought. In it he writes that the September 11 attacks upset “the entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” and that a “reexamination of the foundations of modern politics” is therefore needed.

Thiel believes neither in the status quo nor in the wisdom of the people. In his view, decisions should be made by elites capable of creating new worlds, as happens in the tech sector.

If we add to this his serious investments in ventures aimed at drastically extending human life and even achieving immortality… one can only marvel that it is not he but the “gentle retiree” Bill Gates whom conspiracy theories so stubbornly link with the most frightening future.

War and Peace

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” They say this is the most important question Peter Thiel asks at job interviews. As in everything else, here he is looking for the most unorthodox, original, strange answer possible. In case it isn't clear by now, he definitely has a thing for thinking outside the box.

“I believe technology can give us a chance at a much longer and more fulfilling life—and refusing to pursue that possibility is sheer cowardice,” Thiel says. And also: “Death is a problem that can and must be solved.” He has turned this conviction into funding for ventures such as Unity Biotechnology, an anti-aging company, the Methuselah Foundation for life extension, and the Cryonics Institute. More than that, he has said that after his death he too wants his body frozen.

He even gives money to a company researching how young people's blood could be used to slow aging. Brrr.

“A great business is not just a bet on the future, but a bet on the future you want to create,” Thiel writes. And besides writing, he is one of the leaders who never stop reading. His love of science fiction is far from gone, and every year he shares his book recommendations. At the risk of surprising you after everything said so far about his worldview, among his favorite authors is Ayn Rand, with Atlas Shrugged.

He also recommends Ray Kurzweil and… Anna Karenina. Of the classic novel, he says it illustrates the IT business well: “Tolstoy opens with the observation that ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

The Future in the Past

Besides his love of books, his love of chess hasn't faded over the years either. Until 2003 he competed semi-professionally, and in 2016 he was symbolically invited to make the first move in the world championship match between Sergey Karjakin and Magnus Carlsen.

Coming back to Kurzweil, Thiel also believes we live in a decisive time, with very serious changes on the horizon driven by technological progress. “The fate of the world may depend on how we make sense of this decade,” he adds, and few would argue with him. The thing is, though, that he is among the people on whom that future directly depends.

He stayed silent during the recent exchange of online blows between Musk and Trump. A year earlier, however, he had warned that “Musk's support for Trump is incredibly dangerous, because in politics 80% agreement isn't enough—you need 100%.” A prophecy?!

An interesting, unconventional figure—I hope you now know him well enough to agree. And let us hope that his next actions will show more humanity, compassion, empathy. One thing is beyond doubt: from now on, even more decisions on which all our futures depend will rest on Peter Thiel's shoulders. His story leaves us no choice but to be convinced he is capable of dizzying breakthroughs and unthinkable ideas.

Besides, he is undoubtedly right that it is more often worth asking ourselves:

“What if we really can do more than we believe we can?”

To tell the whole history of humankind in a few hundred pages… sounds like an impossible task. Then to tell the future. And finally, to draw attention to the big questions of our day in a way that wins over both readers and the people who make decisions… That becomes more than a superhero mission, wouldn't you say? I can think of only one person who has pulled it off, even though he lacks the typical outward features of Batman or Superman.

Yuval Noah Harari. You will often hear the name of the historian and futurist in conversations about the future. In recent years he has established himself as the world's thinker who not only manages to untangle, thoroughly and competently, the threads from which the history of humankind is stitched together, but also poses the big questions of tomorrow.

The Salt of the Earth

But how did a history professor become the favorite author of people like Bill Gates and Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Clinton, while at the same time being popular, translated, read and debated? How does he manage to reach people's minds with his long texts in an age when concentration and a deep look at things have become exotic skills?

A colorful figure, beyond the stereotypes. A favorite target for anyone who wants to shine. A vegan and an animal-rights advocate, he and his husband head a foundation that aims to provoke public debate on important issues. The Israeli is at once a widely recognized scholar and an authority. Most importantly, in my view, he is a valuable and powerful voice warning us about the immediate dangers we face as a species. Here is what is worth knowing about him and his striking insights.

1. “Given the magnitude of the danger, artificial intelligence should be of interest to every human being. While not everyone can become an expert in the field, we must remember that this is the first technology in history that can make decisions and formulate new ideas on its own. All our previous inventions gave new powers to humans, because no matter how powerful a new tool was, the decision about how to use it remained in our hands. Knives and bombs do not decide by themselves whom to kill. They are mere tools, lacking the intelligence that would allow them to process information and make independent decisions. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, can process information by itself and can replace humans in decision-making. It is not a tool but an agent.”*

* The quotes are from Yuval Noah Harari's new book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Harari is a legend, a myth, a luxury brand. Inviting him to give a lecture can cost a six-figure sum in dollars.

Though he himself says that a brand is simply a well-told story that has turned into much more. He tells us about Stalin, who refused to let his own son use his name as proof of authority, because the story is much more.

A Time to Be Born and a Time to Die

There is also a stronger story connected with that same son of Stalin, but Harari chose the other one. “Harari”—you can hear his name from so many directions. On this site, for example, I quote him often for his brilliant metaphor that the human being today is not the crown of creation but simply a creature that can easily be (and already has been!) hacked by algorithms.

How is the Harari legend born? A hard question, but Yuval himself was born in 1976 in the small Israeli town of Kiryat Ata. His father was a weapons engineer, his mother an office manager.

2. “How does information flow? As we have seen, the new information technologies of late modernity gave rise to large-scale democracy and large-scale totalitarianism. But there are key differences in the way the two systems use information technology. Democracy allows information to flow through many mutually independent channels rather than passing through the center, so that many independent centers process it and make decisions. Information circulates freely among private companies, media outlets, municipal authorities, sports associations, charities, families and individuals without passing through any government office. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, seeks to have all information pass through the center and does not want independent institutions making decisions on their own.”

By the age of 3 he could already read; at 8 his ambitious parents enrolled him in a school for gifted children. At 17 he was admitted to study history and international relations at Tel Aviv University.

His home country is famously strict about military service, yet he was spared it. First it was deferred by his university studies, then by medical reasons.

To this day Harari, perhaps the most popular thinker of our new age, lives in a typical middle-class neighborhood of Tel Aviv. All while being one of the favorite speakers at Davos and one of the best-selling writers on the planet. Even so, they say, his life is unusually modest. Far from the glitter of high society, which, of course, cannot be unconnected to his nationality.

3. “For a long time we believed that the victory of democracy over totalitarianism was final. That victory is usually explained by democracy's fundamental advantages in processing information—totalitarianism doesn't work because it tries to concentrate and process all data in one place, which is extremely inefficient. At the start of the twenty-first century, it seemed that the future belonged to distributed information networks and to democracy. That turned out to be wrong. In fact, the next information revolution, which is just gathering momentum, is preparing the ground for a new round in the contest between democracy and totalitarianism.”

He specialized in medieval warfare and went on to a doctorate at Oxford. And soon afterward, imperceptibly and unexpectedly… he became a superstar. Forgive me for repeating myself, but he definitely does not like to talk about personal matters and knows how to keep them hidden; from what we know, though, his first book came out almost by chance.

Ask, and It Shall Be Given You

After successfully completing his doctorate, Harari returned home and began teaching the fundamentals of historical science to students from a wide range of majors. The students loved the course, and so came a publisher's invitation for Harari to gather his lectures into a book. Thus in 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind appeared, bringing together millennia of evolution in an engaging narrative, as the historian sees it. Three years later it was translated into English, and today it has been published in more than 50 languages. The book stayed in the top three of The New York Times list for 96 consecutive weeks! Not a romance, not a thriller, but a scholar's account of humanity's past…

Sapiens catapulted its author's popularity to a global level. A history textbook, only written with the page-turning pull of an adventure novel. The reader gallops from the Stone Age through the agricultural revolution all the way to the age of artificial intelligence, realizing along the way that our species' secret weapon is neither muscle nor claws but the unique ability to believe in shared “fictions”—gods, nations, money—that bind us together in groups.

Harari shows how one particular species of primate rose to become master of the planet thanks to its rich imagination and its ability to cooperate in large societies through shared myths.

4. “By skillfully using language, computers can go one step further. By conversing and interacting with us, they can form intimate relationships with people and use them to influence us. To create such fake intimacy, computers don't need feelings; they only need to learn how to make us become emotionally attached to them.”

Having reminded us where we come from, Harari turned his gaze forward. In 2016, in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the historian looked at humanity's ambitions to surpass itself, to defeat aging and death, and even to “upgrade” Homo sapiens into a kind of god.

The Beam in Thine Own Eye

In this book Harari predicts both dizzying achievements and grim scenarios. He warns of the emergence, by the middle of the century, of a new kind of people—the “useless class,” unable to fit into the labor market. While some become godlike through biotechnology, others risk being left as superfluous onlookers. As the futurist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova aptly put it, it is the time when we have to reinvent ourselves.

5. “We humans are still holding the reins. Nobody knows how long that will last, but we still have the power to shape these new realities. To do so wisely, we need to understand what is happening. When we write a computer program, we are not just creating a new product; we are reshaping politics, society and culture, so it is good to have a solid understanding of each of these fields. We also need to take responsibility for what we do.”

But why did a historian, and a specialist in medieval wars at that, step into the role of futurist? I don't think anyone could find a worthy answer. Naturally, the courage to venture in such a different direction has earned him criticism too, but it doesn't seem to trouble him.

Next came the essay collection 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and then we arrive at his newest book—Nexus boldly peers into the existential questions about the future of humankind in the age of artificial intelligence. Into the next step in the seemingly eternal war between democratic regimes and autocracy.

At least in my view, in this paradigm he gets carried away by stereotypes, by black-and-white, emotional thinking. He tries to project phenomena from the past onto a future that, by every indication, is far too different for far too many reasons. But, I am sure, my opinion would not trouble an adviser to American presidents and an author with print runs in the millions. So if you ever meet him, feel free not to spare him.

Love Suffereth Long, and Is Kind

Harari strongly (and, in my opinion, naively) advocates very strict regulation of artificial intelligence. He points out that every pharmaceutical product goes through years of evaluation before it reaches people, while new versions of artificial intelligence, on which the future of all humankind may depend, are released just like that, mostly at the discretion of tech leaders. Yes, regulation is a wonderful idea—at least until we realize that the models keep getting better and are open source. And the idea of controlling such a technology may safely be called an illusion.

6. “A dangerous asymmetry arises. The leaders of the information revolution know far more about the technology than the people who are expected to regulate it. What, then, is the point of repeating that the customer is always right and the voter knows best?

Nexus: a link. That which connects us as human beings and which is only now confronting us with the enormous challenge of technology—the very reason this site exists.

The success of his books inspired him to found Sapienship, an organization that aims to focus society's attention on the most important global challenges. It is headed by his husband, Itzik Yahav, who is also Harari's personal manager. Same-sex marriages are not permitted in Israel, but they are recognized if performed abroad, and so the two married in 2010 in Toronto, Canada. In the rare moments when he allows himself a personal emotion, Harari says Itzik is the love of his life. Although both come from the same small town, their paths crossed some 20 years ago through one of the first online dating apps.

7. “The key question is: what would it be like to live in the new computer network as an increasingly powerless minority? How will the new network change our politics, society, economy and daily lives? How would it feel to be constantly monitored, guided, nudged and sanctioned by billions of nonhuman entities? How will we have to change in order to adapt, survive and even flourish in this astonishing new world?”

Among his other favorite subjects are animal rights, especially those of farm animals. That is why he went vegan long ago; in his view, “industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history,” and “the fate of the animals raised there is one of the most important ethical questions of our time.”

The Truth Shall Make You Free

Meanwhile, he has written many scholarly books on topics such as military operations in the age of chivalry, the concept of “decisive battles” in world history, and the birth of modern warfare.

8. “The end of privacy. In a world where humans watch humans, privacy is the default state, but in a world where computers watch humans, it may become possible for the first time in history to destroy personal space completely.”

Inevitably, he draws no small amount of criticism—both for the way he presents history and for often writing on subjects outside his expertise. According to Ian Parker, “Harari did not invent ‘big history,’ but he updated it with notes of self-help and futurology, as well as a lofty, almost nihilistic calm about human suffering.” Another review of Sapiens, by Christopher Robert Hallpike, states that the author “has read surprisingly little on some quite essential subjects. It would be fair to say that when his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and when he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously.”

Love Your Enemies

One might almost be surprised that it doesn't happen only in our part of the world, but he is often called not a historian but an “infotainment” specialist. And yet, especially in times of frayed authority and a sea of information, his powerful voice is important and useful.

9. “Can we still talk to one another? Civilizations are born from the marriage of bureaucracy and mythology. Computer-based networks are a new kind of bureaucracy, far more powerful and tireless than the human bureaucracy we know from the past. This network is likely to create inter-computer technologies that will be far more complex and alien to us than the gods humans created. The potential benefits of this network are enormous. The potential harm is the destruction of human civilization.”

Harari certainly likes to provoke—he has gone down in history as the first speaker at the TED conferences to appear not in person but as a digital avatar.

Meanwhile, against that backdrop, Yuval himself… avoids technology. Until a few years ago he had no mobile phone at all; now he uses a basic model, saying he needs it only when abroad, in case of emergency.

In the Beginning Was the Word

He describes himself as an atheist but is also devoted to meditation—he practices for two hours every day. Once a year he withdraws from the world to meditate for 30 days or more. He spends them in silence, with no social media, not even books.

10. “In the German elections of May 1928, the Nazi Party won less than 3 percent of the vote, and the republic seemed in no danger. Within less than 5 years it collapsed, and Hitler became an absolute dictator. This reversal is usually explained by the financial crisis of 1929 and the global depression that followed. Whereas before the crash of the American stock markets that year unemployment in Germany was around 4.5 percent, by early 1932 it had reached almost 25 percent.

If three years of high unemployment could turn a seemingly prosperous democracy into the most brutal totalitarian regime history has known, what might happen to democracies when, in the twenty-first century, automation causes even greater upheavals in the job market?”

And though he lives modestly, at the height of the COVID pandemic, when Donald Trump cut American funding to the World Health Organization, his foundation supported it with $1 million.

His political views are clearly liberal; he is no great fan of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his policies.

Give, and It Shall Be Given unto You

What is his greatest fear? That we will destroy humankind without even understanding what we have lost. Whom does he admire? On a personal level, a friend who is a single mother of two children in difficult times. But the historical figure he bows down to is Mikhail Gorbachev, because he probably saved the world from a Third World War.

What secret would he like to share with everyone else? “The people who run the world don't understand it.”

11. “Before the advent of newspapers, radio and other modern information technologies, no large society had managed to combine free debate with institutional trust, which is why democracy was impossible on a large scale. Will the rise of the new computer network make it impossible once again? One of the difficulties is that the computer network makes it easier to join the conversation. In the past, organizations such as newspapers, radio stations and traditional political parties acted as a sieve that determined who got heard in the public sphere. Social media has undermined the role of that sieve, making public conversation more open but also more chaotic.”

People often say he is a posthumanist—an advocate of the school of thought holding that humans should continue their evolution together with technology as a new, different biological species. He denies it, because using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to change human beings is, in his words, “an extremely dangerous idea.”

While It Is Day, the Night Cometh

“I am definitely not a prophet or a guru. I don't predict the future, and I don't think anyone can. History is not deterministic, and nobody has any idea what the world will look like in 2050. All I do is use my knowledge of history to raise questions about the future and to map out possible scenarios, highlighting the most dangerous ones in the hope that we can prevent them,” the professor explains.

12. “As far as we know today, primates, rats and the other living creatures on this planet may be the only conscious beings in the entire universe. We have created a nonconscious but extremely powerful ‘alien’ intelligence. If we do not use it properly, it could end not only human dominion over the planet but also extinguish the flame of consciousness itself, leaving the universe shrouded in impenetrable darkness. It is our responsibility not to let that happen.”

His middle name is a variant of Noah. Could knowledge itself be the Noah's Ark of the future, the one that will save us in turbulent times ahead?

“AI may enslave or destroy us,” runs another popular quote of his, one that came long before we reached advanced artificial intelligence. Harari is certainly among the authorities who were the first to draw public attention to the dangers that come with it. And even if that were his only contribution, it truly matters to every one of us.

“I am glad to see that many people are already concerned about these dangers. I am less glad that instead of uniting against common threats, we are fighting and blaming one another,” says the historian, and I don't think he could be more right.

Especially if we take the next steps too—talk more about these dangers and bring more important perspectives into the conversation. Before it's too late. What will historians write about today's technological times? And will there even be historians? It's up to us. For now.

He is one of the great stars of our day. With 30 years of stubborn persistence he built the company that became the most highly valued of all time. When the moment comes to unveil yet another innovative chip, he turns into a marketing icon.

Jensen Huang grabs the leather jacket, steps into the spotlight, where he feels right at home, and the show begins.

Eastern wisdom meets Western polish. One of the richest Americans, the only one on the list who was born in China (…in a manner of speaking). His story arrives to show that even today strong personalities matter. It is worth walking his wonderfully curious path together, and hearing his views on the future we are all going to live in.

We Wash Dishes of All Kinds

“1978 – 1983 – dishwasher, busboy and waiter”

“1993 to present – founder and CEO of NVIDIA”

That is how our hero's résumé reads if you decide to look up his profile on the “professional Facebook”—LinkedIn. If you have never wandered into that social network, it is usually the place where people in IT raise the stakes and present themselves in the best possible light to impress their potential next employers. It is also the platform where, now and then, deeper and more meaningful conversations manage to happen, often with the participation of the people who actually make the decisions.

And yet, Jensen Huang washed dishes until '83, then did nothing for 10 years. Shortly before our triumph at USA '94—Bulgaria's legendary run to the World Cup semifinals—he founded a company that quite a few people only learned about in recent years, with the boom in artificial intelligence. How is that possible?!

This Year, Conductors

Let me hurry to tell you: it isn't true.

During the hiatus, the interval between the two jobs, he was preparing for everything that came next. Then again, Jensen definitely has a taste for presenting himself. At least in my modest bubble, since the days when Steve Jobs showed off the next technological breakthroughs, our hero is the first universally acknowledged master of the art. He made the leather jacket his trademark, grew used to the spotlight and to great expectations.

At the epicenter of the explosion in artificial intelligence were the companies developing one impressive model after another, led by OpenAI. But so were the companies on whose shoulders this enormous progress rests. Because the work of scientists in machine learning advanced generation after generation, while the technological limits often came from the capabilities of the hardware.

And then came NVIDIA. A company founded decades earlier to make chips for playing realistic computer games. Suddenly it turned out to be the lord of the most important ingredients, the ones capable of powering the next generations of artificial intelligence models.

Chip 'n Dale

Just how drastic was this change? NVIDIA became not merely the company with the highest stock market value in the world, but the most valuable company that has ever existed. Then it broke another record—for the steepest drop in market value. That happened on the day the Chinese company DeepSeek brought its new AI model onto the stage, showing that perhaps we are not quite so dependent on the most expensive chips to take the next big steps in AI.

Suffice it to add that, until then, the only companies ever valued at 3 trillion (3,000,000,000,000!) dollars were Apple and Microsoft.

And on that list… why is the name so hard to pronounce? It comes from invidia, the Latin word for “envy,” and NV, “next vision.” “Next vision” was a term the company used early on to label its files. Computer-nerd in-jokes, which nonetheless turned into one of the most famous trademarks around.

The markets have lost their minds, humanity has gone mad, you might say. But there is a reason. If we need a few more concrete figures: NVIDIA's sales for 2004 came to $89 million. This year the company makes that much in sales every… 26 hours!

黃仁勳

No, I am not insulting you with what I wrote above—that is our hero's name according to his first documents. Huang Jen-Hsun was born in 1963 in the Republic of China. What is that, you may ask—hasn't China been a People's Republic for quite a while now? Exactly. It is the official name taken by the island of Taiwan, home to Mr. Huang's native city of Tainan.

Life, however, quickly carried him to the other side of the Pacific, where Jen-Hsun officially changed his name, and so Jensen Huang was “born.” Today his personal fortune is estimated at around 120 billion dollars, which puts him very close to the top 10 richest people in the world. He owns about 3.4 percent of the company that is the newest unavoidable force in the world of technology (and in the rest of the world too, which lately is ever more tightly bound to it).

But how does this happen to a man who writes that, until the age of 30, his experience was as a “dishwasher, busboy and waiter”?! The American Dream in action, pure luck? Or a combination of enterprise, persistence, sensible decisions… and the right moment, when artificial intelligence became the world's number one topic and it turned out that its progress rests, to a large extent, on the very company Jensen created.

Kung Fu Panda

His father, Huang Hsing-tai, was a chemical engineer, and his mother, Lo Tsai-hsiu, a primary school teacher. When he was 6, the family moved to Thailand, to the capital, Bangkok. His parents, however, were looking east (yes, when you keep going east, even the West becomes the East). His father went to New York for training, liked it, and decided the future lay there. First he sent the 9-year-old Jensen and his brother, a year older, to their uncle. The family lived in a small provincial town in the state of Washington, where the children faced serious hardships.

An unfortunate mistake occurred. The uncle and aunt had read somewhere that they had chosen a prestigious school… and it turned out to be a boarding school for troubled kids. Jensen was made to clean the toilets every day, while his brother worked on a tobacco farm. In a town without many immigrants, the boys were bullied by their classmates, who not only insulted them but threatened them with knives.

A few years later the family was reunited in Oregon. Fascinated by computers since childhood, Jensen enrolled at the state university, where he studied computer science and integrated circuit design. So perhaps his experience before 30 wasn't only about serving and delivering?

His own joke aside, he began his career in that notorious year, 1984, as a chip designer at AMD. The company, whose abbreviation stands for “Advanced Micro Devices,” would for many years be closely tied to the great chip battle with Jensen's future “offspring,” the two sharing a tightly intertwined history worthy of a Taiwanese version of The Bold and the Beautiful.

His next workplace was LSI Corporation, where he led the development of modern chips. Meanwhile, he did not abandon his education—by 1992 he held a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.

Envy, Anyone?

The fairy tale of his success, as we have seen, begins a year later. “In 1993, I founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to solve the problem of 3D graphics for PCs,” Jensen writes modestly and laconically in his LinkedIn profile. “Our pioneering work in accelerated computing led to the reinvention of modern computer graphics and the creation of modern AI.”

Is that so? It is. Every powerful story can be told in two sentences, but in most cases it loses something in the process.

Today NVIDIA employs 32,000 people. “And we are looking for talented, driven, adventurous people ready to take on challenges no one else can solve. NVIDIA employees create technology that moves all of humanity forward and support the communities where they work and live.”

Jensen Huang and company certainly do not owe their success to chance. They owe it to professionalism and innovation, because over all three decades of computer development they have paved the way for the technologies that followed.

Both Micro and Soft

Software is a wonderful direction to grow in—ask Bill Gates. Programs also support a huge part of today's Bulgarian IT sector, which never stops being attractive and growing, even now that AI poses serious challenges to it. Over the past decades, hardware definitely stayed in software's shadow. Technology advanced, computers grew better and faster—you may remember the days when a few megabytes were the limit of what you could store. Then came cloud services, and hardware—the computers themselves with all their components—became an important but banal topic; the next solutions simply kept arriving.

And then came ChatGPT, and the world turned its gaze to artificial intelligence. Every new model keeps impressing with yet another big success, with the new capabilities it gives us (which I often show on this site). Suddenly it turned out that the “machine” itself was crucial once again. That hardware progress is undeniable, but there is one particular detail that matters enormously in the age of artificial intelligence. But what does AI have to do with a company created to do its best at displaying ever more perfect three-dimensional graphics, ever more realistic virtual reality…?

The processor is the heart of your computer. It processes data, distributes it, “runs” the code. With the rise of machine learning, which for a long time even scientists refused to call “artificial intelligence,” things changed. Graphics processors, chips whose role until then had been merely to display, moved to center stage. They are made mainly by two large companies, and they turned out to be an extremely valuable resource. It became clear that they have no rival when parallel computing is needed—which is exactly how today's machine learning algorithms work.

The Players' Game

No one could have foreseen anything of the kind back in '93, which in technological time is so very far away. Yes, computers had developed by then and had already made it into homes. But even the mass internet was still a distant illusion, and one of the undisputed uses of the time was games. A serious race was taking shape in the field of graphics processors, and NVIDIA joined it with a flying start. Jensen launched the venture with two friends, who gradually faded into the shadow of the media spotlight. The starting capital was a modest $40,000, but investors were found relatively quickly. Developing chips is certainly a more expensive undertaking than software; it cannot happen without serious money.

But it is also harder. The company's first chip was a failure. Then, in 1997, came the second—RIVA 128—and it became a market hit. Soon after, the GeForce 256 established Huang's firm as the leader in the industry.

The battle played out in a particularly interesting way. In 1996 more than 30 companies were racing to offer new graphics cards, while five years later only 2 had survived—NVIDIA and the Canadian ATI. A little later, the rival was sold to AMD, and so we arrive at 2018, when our hero's company held 3/4 of the graphics processor market against 1/4 for the other giant, with almost no one else on the market.

I mentioned the curious connection between the two mastodons of the field. A great battle, free competition! You may have heard the story of the two Dassler brothers, who created the sports giants Adidas and Puma. Well, a similar plot is unfolding in the era of advanced graphics chips. Since 2014, AMD has been led by Lisa Su, who is Jensen's niece.

Programs and More Programs!

NVIDIA went public in 1999. When its share price reached 100 dollars, Jensen had the company logo tattooed on his left shoulder. He says he will hardly ever get a second tattoo. If he has broken his promise, we have no way of knowing, since you will hardly ever see him at a public event without his signature leather jacket.

Pavel Durov's children number 106, Elon Musk's 14 (so far). Compared to them, Jensen is terribly boring. He met his wife, Lori Mills, while teaching her at university. They have a boy and a girl with the typically Taiwanese names Spencer and Madison. For a long time Spencer made his living from the bar he opened in his father's homeland. Then he decided he had had enough cocktails and started work as a product manager at NVIDIA. Madison ran a hotel for many years before she, too, joined the ranks of the family company.

Jensen and family give generously to charity and work with the foundations of Bill and Melinda Gates. The Huang family has set aside a whole billion dollars to support students in California.

He was absent from the inauguration of the new American president, unlike the familiar faces of the software world. He was even asked about it, and he said he had been busy traveling to celebrate the Lunar New Year with his colleagues. But, by all appearances, a great deal will yet depend on him and his company.

Papa Carlo

“I think there are three conditions for people to be able to do their life's work,” Jensen reveals his credo. “Give them access to information. I don't make decisions where only one person needs to hear them. I prefer an environment where a team of different experts can work on a problem. Reason through problems in public. It's incredibly empowering to take an abstract idea and argue it down to exactly what we should or shouldn't do. A complete company. I try to encourage the experts and contributors at every level of the company to work on a problem at the same time.”

He draws every eye each time he appears at a company event to unveil yet another revolutionary chip capable of far greater computing power. And then, unlike so many promises in Silicon Valley, it turns out that the promise is kept—the new generation of chips really can do everything our hero said it would.

So successful, and yet part of… the biggest “deflation” in stock market history? Yes, when the Chinese startup DeepSeek unveiled its revolutionary model, NVIDIA's shares collapsed at a remarkable pace. In a single day, Huang himself lost a virtual, but still rather remarkable, 20 billion dollars!

Still, this battle has only just begun. And whatever its future looks like, Jensen Huang will surely be an important part of it. That is why it is worth hearing a little more of his views on all the big themes of tomorrow.

Words Break No Bones

“The last 10 years have really been about the science of artificial intelligence,” says the founder of Nvidia. “Over the next 10 years we'll have a lot of AI science, but it will be focused on its application, the fundamental versus the applied. AI will become widespread and make its way into almost every industry.”

For better or worse, he seems to be right. His advice to future generations is simple: “Learn to use the technology in its various forms. If I were a student today, the first thing I would do is learn AI. Get used to interacting with ChatGPT, with Gemini Pro, with Grok. Learning to work with AI is no different from being really good at asking questions.”

“If I gave a computer to someone who had never seen anything like it, there's no way they'd learn to use it in a day. Whereas today you can simply type: ‘I don't know how to use ChatGPT, tell me,’ and it will come back with examples itself. The incredible thing about AI is that it will help you and make you superhuman along the way.”

Huang also says that in ten years “everything that moves will be robotic, every car will be robotic. Humanoid robots, the technology needed to make them happen, is very close, just around the corner.”

Huangis

“I think my work-life balance is excellent. I work from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed, seven days a week. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about work,” Jensen boasts. It doesn't sound very healthy.

They also call him “the Taylor Swift of tech.” How apt the comparison is I will ask Miss Swift's fans to tell me—I'll be delighted if some of them have read this far.

One of the company's recent conferences was held at the stadium in San Jose. Highly unusual and ambitious for the computer world. “I'm an engineer, I'm not a singer. When I walked out there…, everyone went crazy, it took my breath away. I was more scared than I've ever been. I'm still scared,” he says.

Mr. Huang's presentations are, as a rule, meaningful, polished and engaging. And, without fail, they feature his trademark—the leather jacket, which seems to have gone out of fashion so long ago. “Leather jackets can be a sign of an edge: a willingness to break the rules, to do things differently and to challenge the status quo,” says fashion stylist Serra Murphy. “Jensen's signature style gives him a relaxed, approachable energy.”

Definitely. The interesting, strong personalities are still out there—the ones who not only draw the future but also stir our hearts.

But where will this New Age biker from the Republic of China lead us on his motorcycle? The most interesting part is surely yet to come. In the world of technology, and in the world of interesting stories. Of the personalities who draw tomorrow. Safe travels, 生 Jensen!

What do Harry Potter and Bill Gates have in common? The glasses, you'll say, the magic maybe. Harry has not yet been accused of a global conspiracy, or of wanting to microchip us all with vaccines, but it's not too late for him to catch up.

Bill Gates as a young man. It could be the start of a good joke or of a fairy tale (though a beautiful princess somehow wouldn't suit him). This is something else—the subject of the recently released book Source Code, published almost simultaneously in Bulgarian and English. In his first autobiography, Mr. Gates goes back to his early years to tell us astonishing and unexpected episodes that marked the beginning of the computer era. And, we can say without the slightest exaggeration, the steps that over the past decades changed the life of every person on this planet.

Write, Bill, Write!

Can you picture the founder of Microsoft as a thief of time? How did climbing high mountain peaks shape his biggest successes in the software world? Why was the dream of beating his grandmother at cards among the main ideas that turned him into the richest man on the planet?

Hardly anyone would accuse Bill Gates of having the skills of a brilliant novelist, yet the stories told by one of the most important people of our time (like him or not) are certainly impressive. I chose eight of them to tell you; you'll find many more fascinating facts in the book itself.

This is the first autobiography of the man who was for years the richest on the planet and who in 2025 reaches the venerable age of 75. And that, as he himself will tell us in a moment, is the reason he decided to tell us about his past.

Although the book is quite hefty and detailed, it is only the beginning, covering Bill's stories from the first 23 years of his life. For the rest, he promises two more volumes—devoted to the real expansion and the times when Microsoft became a dominant force. Later there will be talk of his current ventures too, of his famous philanthropy and his views on the future.

So, it's as if we're in the pensioners' club of a small Bulgarian town long emptied of its bustle. A grandfather, grown wise with the years, has sat down with his grandchild over a glass of water and a spoonful of bialo sladko, the sugary white fondant Bulgarians traditionally offer guests, and begins to tell his story.

He goes back to those distant times when the foundations of Silicon Valley were being poured…

1. “The world, in general, can be understood”

We begin with a telling story, which I'll share with you in a somewhat longer quote. Because it is definitely worth it—to make us think, and to remind us of our own grandmothers. And to convince us once again that any task can become a challenge. Even one that develops in us skills and abilities we never suspected, that makes us set ourselves high goals. And so… here is how the good young Bill tells us about his grandmother and the hard-fought card battles with her, which later became the example that would lead him forward:

“There would be wealth, rivalries, and constant worries about staying at the forefront of the technological revolution. But before all that there was only a deck of cards and a single goal—to beat my grandmother.

The whole time I watched her closely. In computer science there is the concept of a ‘finite-state machine,’ a mathematical model that receives input and, based on a set of additional conditions, takes the optimal action. Gami was a true finite-state machine at games—her mental algorithm methodically processed the probabilities and the branching options for making a decision.

We played and played, and I lost and lost. But I watched and improved. Gami kept gently encouraging me the whole time. ‘Think smart, Trey. Think smart,’ she would tell me as I weighed my next move. The implication was that if I focused and used my brain properly, I could hit on the right card to play. I could win.

And one day I did. There were no fanfares, no prizes or applause. I don't even remember exactly what we were playing the day I won more games than she did. But I know my grandmother was pleased. I'm sure she smiled at me in acknowledgment of my growth. Eventually, after about five years, I began to win regularly. By then I was almost a teenager and competitive by nature. I enjoyed the mental struggle and the deep sense of satisfaction that came with mastering new skills. Playing cards taught me that however complex and impenetrable a subject may seem, you can often figure it out. The world, in general, can be understood.”

2. Billy the Kid

Yes, even Bill was once a boy who learned so much about life from playing cards with his grandmother. The tech world reminds us that it is entirely possible for a person of the most unremarkable social background, who landed in the right place at the right time and was stubborn enough not to give up, to work wonders.

A perfectly ordinary kid, just like the one we see on the cover. Or, as Bill himself describes it (I allow myself to call him by his first name; after all, we're colleagues—programmers):

“I was born on October 28, 1955, the second of three children in the family. Kristi, born in early 1954, was twenty-one months older, and Libby didn't appear on the scene until a decade later. As a baby I was called Happy Boy, because I always had a wide smile on my face. Not that I didn't cry, but the joy I felt apparently outweighed the other emotions.”

3. Read, Bill, Read!

You have probably noticed that “bill” in English has quite a few meanings, and one of them is the account you pay at the end. Well, as a kid he certainly couldn't account for what he wanted to do. What to take up, which way to go. Contrary to the stereotype, as a boy he was drawn mainly to two things—books and mountains.

It's worth pondering that the technologies he and his colleagues paved the way for, the digital revolution that came with the help of his developments, have certainly distanced us as human beings from both.

“Books were the only thing my parents never hesitated to spend money on. One of our greatest treasures was the complete 1962 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. I was amazed at how much information was packed into the twenty red-and-blue volumes, with their glossy pages and bright illustrations. Especially interesting were the transparent plastic diagrams of bones, muscles, and organs that layered one over another to form a whole human body. That encyclopedia was for me a door to nature, geography, science, politics, and almost every other field of knowledge.

By the time I turned nine, I had read almost all the volumes, from A to Z. On top of that, every January the encyclopedia's Yearbook arrived in the mail like a belated Christmas present—a twelve-month helping of history in the making, which I devoured greedily.”

Of course, stereotypes don't help here. I once ran a similar experiment myself: I invited 15 Bulgarian IT leaders to tell me their favorite books, and the results were more than remarkable.

Well, for today's hero this is nothing new. Every year he publishes a list of reads he recommends. I wonder when this will become a tradition in Bulgaria too?

What's more, books are what made him dream. And search for the path to success.

“Together we read the biographies of famous figures, of leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur, and picked their lives apart. We analyzed the paths that led them to success with the same teenage fervor with which our peers deciphered the lyrics of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. How did a person get into West Point and, over time, become a great commander? We compared General MacArthur, groomed from an early age to pursue a military career, with General Patton, who seemed born to be a brilliant leader. To gain historical perspective, we leafed through books about Napoleon, captivated by his genius and his terrible flaws.”

4. An Inseparable Class

What ultimately won Bill Gates his fame (and his money) is that, together with his team, he managed to create the first software for the first personal computer. These were no longer the enormous machines that filled entire rooms and were available only to scientific laboratories, but a new generation of technology ready to enter every home.

None of this would have happened the same way had Bill not befriended “the right people.” We go back to the 1970s, when the future richest man on the planet meets Paul Allen. He and the Microsoft co-founder would be bound by such a long, deep, and complicated relationship. But it all begins with a classic childhood encounter:

“A boy named Paul Allen immediately sensed my attitude and made excellent use of it. The first lines addressed to me by the person with whom I would later found Microsoft were along the lines of: ‘Bill, if you think you're so smart, tell me how to do such-and-such.’ The Lakeside computer room had opened just weeks earlier, and we were all jostling for a spot in front of the machine. Without any instructions, apart from the scant guidance of our teachers, we struggled to figure out how to write our first programs. Paul was fifteen, two years older than me, but considered himself far more mature.”

As our hero himself admits in the book, he would later force his friend and partner Paul Allen to give up more and more of his shares in the company that would become a global hegemon. But before we get there, the wild young years have to pass. Bill's best friend was named Kent Evans; gradually, with Paul and one more kid, they became an inseparable quartet, until… they fell out in a particularly ugly way.

Here we come to a human tragedy from which Bill would learn a great deal. Years later he would talk with Kent's family, and together they would discuss whether the whole history of personal computer software might have unfolded differently had this not happened. Kent, Bill's best friend, died after an accident while rock climbing.

“Dan told me bluntly that there had been an accident during the climb. Kent had fallen, and a helicopter rescue team had taken him to the hospital. I expected to hear when I could visit him. ‘I'm sorry, Bill, they couldn't help him. Kent died last night.’”

5. How the Silicon Was Tempered

Having lost his best friend, as Bill himself tells us, he kept moving forward. At the same time, his relationship with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen deepened. By then Bill had just been admitted to Harvard, where he ran into the typical challenges of youth. He is even quite candid about them:

“It all started with Scotch—cheap Scotch that Paul brought and got me drunk on for the first time, so that I threw up and fell asleep in the Lakeside teachers' lounge. That episode was followed a few days later by a demonstration of how to smoke a joint. And then, of course, he declared that I couldn't really call myself experienced if I hadn't tried LSD. I refused.”

Bill and Paul's first encounter with alcohol (and more) remains tersely recounted, unlike their encounter with computers. At first, as a school project, he got the chance to work with the most advanced technology and to get to know the BASIC programming language. He and Paul often talked about it and reached a conclusion that sounds especially relevant today:

“Again and again our evening conversations with Paul came back to software. Software was different. There were no cables, no factories. Writing software required only brainpower and time, and the experience we had accumulated made us unique. This was the field where we had an advantage. We could even rank among the leaders. But first we needed a computer.”

6. Blessed Years, When Microsoft Was Young

Unexpectedly, it appears—the first prototype. The two come across an ad that impresses them:

“The era of a computer in every home had arrived? Was that really so? For the price of $397 for the Altair 8800, you got the unassembled version—a kit of hundreds of separate parts. Once you had finished all the screwing and soldering, you could only hope the machine would work.”

The two decided to seize the moment. Here we reach their big breakthrough. Thanks to Bill's access to Harvard's computers, they managed to develop pilot software, which, however… they were not at all sure would run on the strange, unassembled machine that would become the ancestor of the personal computer. They contacted its manufacturers, and the next day Paul flew to their office. (This story is closely tied to the legendary figure of Gary Kildall, “the better Bill Gates”, whom the “original” never mentions in his memoir.)

But the story unfolds like a movie. Paul was already on the plane to present the software, written mainly by Bill, when it occurred to him that perhaps they weren't ready to show it to their future partners.

“And indeed, we had missed something. On the plane Paul realized that we hadn't written a small part of the program called a bootloader, which was responsible for loading it and launching it from the computer. He took out his notepad and began feverishly writing the missing lines.

The next day at MITS the machine was set up with 6K of memory and a paper tape reader. Paul entered his bootloader, which took a while, because every byte had to be keyed in by hand using the eight switches. Then he started the reader. Loading our BASIC program took about seven minutes. Finally the tape reached its end, the program started and… nothing happened. It didn't work. They tried again, and this time the terminal displayed:

MEMORY SIZE?

Paul typed in a few BASIC commands to demonstrate our magnum opus.

PRINT 2+2
4
OK

With that, the first software written for the first personal computer came to life.”

7. Billy Idol

Can you imagine? 2 + 2 = 4, and entrepreneurs rejoicing like little children…

Bill would soon abandon further steps in his education in favor of a small company that still needed a name, and they would settle on Microsoft, a name worthy of colorful anecdotes. As mentioned, the giant's rise remains the subject of Mr. Gates's next book. Before we part, though, I'd like to pass on two more brief strokes from his story told over bialo sladko.

The first concerns a corner of nature where even today he finds refuge from the technological madness. Remember that we began with the instructive story about his grandmother Gami and the cards? She comes up again now:

“My mother and grandmother always wanted us to have a place on Hood Canal where we could all gather once my sisters and I grew up and had families of our own.

Gami died in 1987, before they could carry out their plan. On the day of her memorial service, my parents, Libby, Kristi, and I went out to look at a plot of land my grandmother had found for us. I bought the property, and over the following years we built several houses there. This family nest, which my mother named Gateaway, served as my refuge in the good and bad moments—mostly good—of Microsoft's early years. I made a habit of setting aside a week of personal time on Hood Canal, which I called ‘Think Week.’

Once or twice a year I would drive or hire a seaplane to go and spend seven uninterrupted days buried in books, articles, and newspapers—a crash course in everything I thought I needed to learn.”

8. Kill Bill

So what cards was Bill Gates dealt to reach the position of richest man on the planet, to pave the way for the next generation of digital leaders who today dictate the most important steps concerning all our futures?

“I'm not prone to nostalgia, but there are days when I'd like to be thirteen again and make that bet with the world that if you just keep going, learn more, and understand better, you can make something truly new and useful.”

I couldn't find a clear-cut answer for myself—luck certainly has a worthy place in the recipe, but so does persistence. And stories like these come to remind us that we are all human, and that what unites us is greater than what technology teaches us divides us. And at certain moments even figures like Bill Gates can become likable. Relax, show what's inside, what warms the heart.

“For most of my life I have been focused on what lies ahead. Even today, most of the time I work on ideas for breakthroughs that may not happen for years, if at all. But as I get older, I find myself looking back more and more often. Piecing together memories helps me understand myself better. The funny thing about maturity is that if you set aside everything you've learned over the years, it turns out that much of you was there from the very beginning. In many ways I'm still eight, sitting at the table in Gami's dining room as she deals the cards. I feel the same sense of anticipation—a child who is alert and wants to make sense of everything.”

I know it's a heavy cliché, but I agree: it's worth keeping the child inside us alive. And giving it more chances to shine, especially in the chaotic world we live in.

Don't believe me? Ask Bill Gates the next time you run into him…

Who have been the most striking figures in public life over the past few decades? The ones we would least expect, if we believe the stereotypes—the people of technology. From Bill Gates, whom the whole of conspiracy-minded humanity turned into the chief culprit behind the pandemic, to Elon Musk, who, while “saving” our freedom of speech, is our last real hope of rising to the stars as a civilization…

Yes, the cult of personality is going through a rather strange apogee in the digital age. Politicians long ago lost their magic as interesting personalities, artists tend to stay focused on their particular audiences… while the celebrities of technological progress have become the powerful figures of the new era.

Is it because technology is today’s magic? Incomprehensible to many, transformative, alluring… Are the powerful figures of the digital age supermen? Do the innovators get the fame they deserve, or do the idea thieves thrive? What do the representatives of different generations share, and what sets them apart? We meet some very different digital stories…

The Powers That Be

Here is how the stories that make up the essence of the digital age line up side by side.

We’ll talk briefly about the powers that be in the world of technology… and, more broadly, over the past few decades. From Bill Gates to SBF and Sam Altman. Don’t expect their horoscopes; we’re sorting them by generation, with all the caveats these groupings carry, the way they have taken hold in the Western world.

How has the image of the tech hero changed over the past few decades?

Bim, Bam, Boom

(Boomers, 1946–1964)

In the West, people born before the end of World War II are called the “Silent Generation.” The great tycoons of that time, however—Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch, for instance—don’t have much to do with technology. Things change quickly with the generation of “boomers” (from the baby boom), those born in the two decades after the war.

Some of today’s tech heroes just miss this list, but they are among the people known not so much for untold wealth as for their real technological contribution. Such are Dennis Ritchie (1941)—the creator of modern programming languages—and Gary Kildall (1942)—the man remembered by history for almost ending up in Bill Gates’s place, and for… ethical reasons, no less.

In 1945 came the incredible character John McAfee—the creator of the first antivirus program. Here, too, belongs Geoffrey Hinton (1947)—the technological pioneer to whom we owe much of the progress of today’s artificial intelligence (and who warned us about the dangers that come with it). Next come Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (1950) and Robert Martin—“Uncle Bob”, the guru of modern programmers (1952).

1955 is a symbolic year: that is when Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Sir Tim Berners-Lee were born. So different, both in their fates and in their media images. Gates never managed to establish himself as the philanthropist he spent decades and billions of dollars trying to become, while the role of visionary and icon remained with the creator of Apple. And to them we add the scientist who made today’s internet possible (plus a few more strong members of the class, like Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner and Whoopi Goldberg). And James Gosling—the creator of the Java language.

We round off the list of boomers with Bill’s partner Paul Allen (1953), Jaron Lanier (1960)—the digital prophet who came to hate the internet—and Brendan Eich (1961)—the creator of JavaScript, the language that brought events into the browser. The last train for this generation is caught by the founders of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and of Alibaba, Jack Ma (1964).

And so the digital leaders of this period are so different from one another, and so peculiar, that they are hard to generalize about. Because the prime years of this generation coincided with the time when the internet appeared to conquer the world, and computers became a necessity and part of everyday life.

A Bezos-lute Success

(Jeff Bezos, 1964)

Bezos is the first earthling to officially own a three-digit number of billions of dollars. For a long time, the battle at the top of the rich list was fought precisely among the tech faces of the boomer generation.

Bezos is one of those who keep staying near the top regardless of trends. His fortune still exceeds the gross domestic product of quite a few countries… That didn’t change even after his noisy divorce, in which his ex-wife MacKenzie received 4 percent of Amazon’s shares, worth about $36 billion, making her the third-richest woman on the planet.

Unlike Gates and Jobs, he built his wealth not through innovation and technology but through a business model that turned out to be incredibly successful… at least as far as he was concerned. Because Amazon proved to be the main factor behind the bankruptcy of thousands of bookstores around the world. Books were only the beginning that made the brand popular; then it turned into an “everything store” and a role model for everyone else.

You may not have heard the wonderfully curious story that the future multibillionaire’s first delivery went to… Bulgaria? In 1995 Bezos admitted he hadn’t even imagined that the internet had reached our country. The customer chose to pay in cash, which at the time meant… two hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside a floppy disk. He also sent a separate message saying, “The money is in the floppy disk.” He was counting on our customs officers not knowing English and therefore not pocketing the two bills… and he turned out to be right.

He was born when his mother was just 17; a year later his parents split up, and Jeff himself bears the surname of his mother’s second husband. Mike Bezos, who adopted him, was an immigrant from Cuba and by profession… a circus performer, an acrobat. Yes, it’s fairly typical of successful boomers (and not only them) to have had a tough childhood.

You can’t say he lacks a sense of humor—in 2016 he played an alien in one of the Star Trek films.

It’s worth noting that he was among the first in the line of billionaires to turn their gaze to space. And that he is known for his not-so-great treatment of his numerous employees.

Gary, the Better Bill

(Gary Kildall, 1942)

He created the first operating system for personal computers. And, according to legend, he let slip the golden contract with IBM that could have given him the leading position in the software world—a position won instead by Bill Gates and Microsoft. Because he wanted to go flying in his plane instead of going to a meeting.

And although that legend isn’t true, he is undeniably a legend of the dawn of the computer age. He died at just 52 after a drunken brawl, in circumstances that remain unclear to this day. He left his mark on computer history not so much with that incredible chance at enormous wealth in the early years of computing. Rather with his forward-thinking ideas, which we use every day. And with the missed opportunity to become the better composite image of the creators at the dawn of the digital age…

“It was not a happy moment when I realized that computers are made to make money, not to make minds,” said Gary Kildall. He is among the pioneers of the modern computer world; even the most serious authorities acknowledge that he had the chance to become the man at the head of it all, to take up the baton at the dawn of the computer era.

For a long time he served in the military. He nearly ended up in Vietnam, but his officers decided he would be more valuable as a programmer—a profession that practically didn’t exist at the time.

Kildall was the first to write software for microprocessors, and then he created the pioneering operating system for them. The foundations he laid are used in practically every computer built from the dawn of the information age to this day.

Another amusing legend. There was a $200,000 reward for anyone who could find a secret command planted in MS-DOS by Kildall, one that would prove the truth about the copyright to the first operating system. The prize was offered in 2012 by legal consultant Bob Zeidman and, alas, was never claimed.

His path crossed Bill Gates’s many times. At a tech conference Gary said that operating systems were a huge market with room for many companies, while today’s lord of the chips replied: “No! There will only ever be one company there.” After Kildall’s death, Gates wrote that Gary was “one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. A very creative computer scientist who did excellent work.”

“He is divisive. He is manipulative. He has taken much from me and the industry,” Gary, for his part, wrote about Bill in his memoirs. Would the idealist have been the more likable version of Bill Gates? History has no “ifs,” but there is always room for reflection…

(More about him—here.)

The X-Files

(Generation X, 1965–1979)

And so the second generation of digital leaders is just as colorful and motley, with divergent careers and impressive stories.

Of course, we can’t help but begin with the richest man in history—Elon Musk (1971)—about whom there isn’t much left to say, since so much has already been said (still, for the sake of curious coincidences: his “classmates” include Julian Assange, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Lance Armstrong).

What’s interesting here is how many of the digital leaders who greeted the rise of the internet at the turn of the millennium were born within just a few years of one another. 1973 is the birth year of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and of the man to whom we owe Slack—Stewart Butterfield. Just a year older is today’s lord of Google—Sundar Pichai.

This group also includes the current head of Microsoft, Satya Nadella (1967). At the tail end of Generation X we see Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (1976) and… a man whose real name we don’t know, though we do know his age. The mythical creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, was born in 1975.

Quite a motley crew, wouldn’t you say? And yet, from the point of view of the cult of personality, it seems that everyone in this generation stands, more or less, in the shadow of the creator of Tesla. In his role as something between god and jester, provocateur and revolutionary, and so many other contradictions.

There are plenty of parallels to be drawn between Musk and… Thomas Edison. Researcher John Gantz calls the phenomenon “bossism”—a person who has landed in a high financial position is expected practically to steer societies and nations. In part this is also because the wealthy class used to stand much further outside media attention than it does in the age of technology.

According to economist Prof. Paul Krugman, however, many people are thereby putting on a pedestal a man who is “a thin-skinned egomaniac plutocrat displaying his insecurities in public.”

Will there be more such cases in times when the rich keep getting richer, and more and more often do so through technology?

Linus the Lionheart

(Linus Torvalds, 1969)

Linus. Even if you have no interest in technology, it’s bound to sound familiar… Linux. The operating system really is named (almost by accident) after its creator. Linus Torvalds is one of the good heroes of the information age. The people who built today’s internet without being tempted to turn their skills into billion-dollar fortunes and monopolistic projects that quickly take on ugly, manipulative hues.

He first sat down at a keyboard at just 10. He was lucky that his grandfather had bought the supermachine of the day, the Commodore VIC-20 (with a 1-megahertz processor and 5 kilobytes of RAM). He found it so fascinating that a few years later he was already studying computer science at the University of Helsinki.

In August 1991 he bought his first personal computer. He installed the Minix operating system from a floppy disk and didn’t like it. It didn’t seem to work well, the more polished versions cost money he couldn’t afford, and so he decided… to make an operating system himself.

A few weeks later he posted a message on an online forum saying the prototype was ready. Anyone who wanted could download it for free, and it would be great if they shared their impressions afterward. And something more, unheard of until then: Linus shared the complete computer code of his project, down to the last line. In doing so, he set off two revolutions in the computer world at once. In effect, the era of open-source software was born—one of the most meaningful directions in creating programs. And for the first time, users got a high-quality, lightweight operating system that anyone could use however they saw fit.

While working on Linux, its creator ran into an annoying problem. More and more developers were gradually joining in, which caused quite a few difficulties. That is how his other great contribution came about. Today Git is in every software project in the world, without the slightest exaggeration. The system is, once again, open source and makes programmers’ lives many times easier.

What does Linus do today? His fortune is estimated at $150 million. And his main occupation is looking after the Linux kernel. Today Facebook, Google and Wikipedia rely heavily on this operating system, and of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, the number running Linux is… 500.

The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. That is what Linus calls the book in which, together with David Diamond, he tells the story of his two great projects. And its first words are: “Just for fun…”

(More about him—here.)

Slumdog Millionaire

(Sundar Pichai, 1972)

Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t particularly inclined toward media fame either, but their successor today is practically unknown to the public. And that somehow fits perfectly with the image of a company that conquers huge markets and vast fields of attention without aggressively imposing itself.

He rarely speaks to the media, and even more rarely in a way that sticks. Sundararajan Pichai was born on June 10, 1972, in Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu. The family wasn’t among the poorest—his father was an electrical engineer at a British company and his mother worked as a stenographer. They lived in a modest home, where he and his brother slept in the living room. It was a great celebration when they managed to buy a refrigerator. And when they got a telephone, they were the first in the neighborhood to have such a luxury, and many neighbors came over to make calls from their home.

He graduated in metallurgy in 1995, stood out for his grades and left for a master’s degree at Stanford, where for the first time he had regular access to a computer. Once again his focus was engineering and materials science. He liked the United States and decided to stay.

He changed direction sharply and completed an MBA, then spent several years in management at a large consulting firm before the time came for his current employer.

His first interview fell on… April 1, and one of the topics the conversation turned to was the future big project, Google Mail. Pichai, however, hadn’t heard of it and decided it was an April Fools’ joke. He replied that such a program couldn’t exist. His future employers, however, knew what they were looking for, and described him as “the candidate of intellectual humility.”

He joined in 2004 and first headed product management and development. He was definitely lucky to land in the right place at the perfect time. Then he climbed the ladder slowly but surely, coordinating some of the key projects, before Brin and Page entrusted him with the most important role.

Unlike at other big modern companies, the man at the top is an employee, not an owner. Sundar is simply a hired hand… with an impressive income. In 2020 his annual salary was $2 million, with about $5 million more in bonuses. Several times he was invited to take the top jobs at Twitter and Microsoft, but he stayed loyal to his current employer.

“There may be things about technology that frustrate you, and others that make you impatient,” he said in a commencement speech to graduating students. “Don’t lose that impatience. It will create the next technology revolution. And it will allow you to build things my generation couldn’t even dream of.” A bit like Louis Armstrong, wouldn’t you say?

(More about him—here.)

The Babies of the Century

(Millennials, 1980–1996)

And so we come to the modern faces of recent years, the millennials, those who greeted the new millennium as young people or children old enough to know it. The boundaries of this generation are more arbitrary—many limit it to the 1980s—but either way, that is when many of today’s digital leaders were born, whom we can once again link to the cult of personality.

Symbolically or not, the decade begins with the only Bulgarian name that has a place on such a list, and with not-so-positive associations at that. In 1980 Ruja Ignatova was born—the Cryptoqueen behind the OneCoin scheme, who turned out to be a darker version of Cinderella and is now wanted all over the world.

1983 must have been a rebellious year, because that is when Tristan Harris—“the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”—and Edward Snowden were born. Oh, and Zhang Yiming, the creator of TikTok.

Since I belong to the same year as the next batch of people, I can say that those of us born in 1984 are quite a motley lot. We start with the undisputed big star of the generation, the man who has changed all our lives the most, Mark Zuckerberg. Also here are Jason Citron—the creator of the new, modern network Discord—and Matt Mullenweg, to whom we owe WordPress and the chance for anyone to have a decent website of their own.

We must also add Sam Altman (1985), the man who led the latest revolution in the world of artificial intelligence with the famous ChatGPT.

The list of millennials is completed by the creator of Telegram, Pavel Durov (1984 again), and Patrick (1988) and John (1990) Collison, who, thanks to their financial project Stripe, were for a long time the youngest billionaires.

The Matt Who Gave Us Back the Internet

(Matt Mullenweg, 1984)

Today WordPress carries on its shoulders… a third of the world’s websites! People keep choosing it because in its basic form you don’t even need to know how to program. The system is easy, intuitive and time-tested.

Its creator, Matthew Charles Mullenweg, born on January 11, 1984, is an interesting bird. Programming became his main field, but he is anything but the typical computer-absorbed type. He’s into cooking, photography, writing and good music. At school he specialized in saxophone, and his university degree is in political science.

2003: Matt is a freshman at the University of Houston. He decides to start a blog, choosing the b2/cafelog platform, to show his classmates photos from a trip to Washington. The platform is far from perfect; Matt needs a few small, specific improvements so he can upload the pictures. So he tries to contact the people behind the project… and hits a wall.

The platform’s creator has vanished, and Matt decides to seek advice on a popular programming forum. Days go by, and only one comment appears below. A certain Mike Little writes: “If you’re serious about forking b2, I would be interested in contributing.”

Matt doesn’t think twice, and the two start their own venture. The project was launched right on April 1, a date also celebrated as WordPress’s birthday. Matt and Mike became an iron duo, working from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Mike was a British programmer with 20 years’ experience who successfully balanced the student’s youthful enthusiasm.

Later Matt founded the software company Automattic, which today has almost 2,000 employees. Long before other firms were forced to switch to remote work, he built it in as the model.

Today his fortune is estimated at $400 million. His entrepreneurial spirit doesn’t get in the way of working for the common good—somehow it complements it. His first business was cleaning windows; at school he assembled computers.

A stylish touch by WordPress’s creators is that every new version of the platform is named after a jazz musician the developers love; the first, from January 2004, bears the name of Miles Davis. With each new version the creators also release a playlist of their favorite performances by the chosen jazzman.

“Actually, a common trait of successful people is that they are voracious readers,” Matt says. “Technology closes the gap between what a person can imagine and what they can do. As a result, it creates a level playing field like never before in human history.”

And also: “Technology is best when it brings people together.”

(More about him—here.)

Meta Man

(Mark Zuckerberg, 1984)

I don’t know about you, but I’ll remember this figure not as the innovator who created the most successful online platform and changed the way we communicate. Rather as the awkward young man constantly forced to justify himself for one thing or another.

Not that he has nothing to justify—Facebook has certainly given us a lot, but taken a lot too. And yet it’s impressive how Mark Zuckerberg not only created such an enormous project but also managed to run it for two decades. Without ever stopping its growth, turning it into a mammoth unmatched by anything else in influence and development.

And yet today no one could accuse him of a cult of personality. Whatever we may say, charisma always remains part of the magic cocktail of popularity, and he… well, has none. None of Jobs’s magic or Musk’s madness.

He was born in New York; his father is a dentist and his mother a physician. He has three sisters. It all began while Mark was studying computer science at Harvard… and ended up as a project with over 3 billion monthly active users! Who says miracles don’t happen today, or that one good (maybe) idea can’t change the world?

He took the helm of his company at just 19. It started with a little project called Facemash, which Mark created to make communicating with his classmates more fun—swapping photos and rating who was hotter. Rumors that the idea wasn’t originally his date from that period. Either way, the project soon grew and got the name we still know it by.

The platform appeared in 2004; by the end of the year it already had 1 million users and $500,000 in investment. How events unfolded after that, we all know.

Yes, there have been scandals, such as the data leak in the Cambridge Analytica affair. The metaverse he bet on looks dismal for the moment. But none of this changes the fact that the still-young man has a three-digit number of billions of dollars and never leaves the world’s top ten richest. While remaining strange and often incomprehensible.

For example, for a long time he declared that he ate only meat from animals he had killed himself, because he considered it honest. He likes running. In 2016 he set himself the goal of running 365 miles—a mile a day on average—and he managed it. He goes around supposedly casually dressed in a T-shirt… which, however, is specially made for him and costs around $400.

Unlike most modern tech gurus, he is still with his college sweetheart, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician by profession and a Buddhist by faith. She is also presented as a philanthropist, one of the biggest donors to various causes. They have three daughters—Maxima, August and Aurelia. I’d like to end with a beautiful, meaningful quote of his, but… I couldn’t find one. Not even in his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s show, where once again… he was justifying himself. This time over the way fake news gets flagged.

Z, Sweet as Honey

(Generation Z, 1997–2010)

And so we reach the newest young people. Here, alas, it’s still too early to talk about impressive personalities. Which is telling about the times we live in—if in 2007 Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire at just 23, today, of the 2,668 billionaires on the Forbes world list, only twelve are under 30, and many of them come from entirely different sectors or inherited their wealth.

Or perhaps Mark is more of an exception. Musk, for instance, amassed his first billion dollars after 40, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison did it at 49. The youngest tech leaders haven’t arrived yet, and to send you off with two characteristic stories, I have to stretch the boundaries of the generation a little—according to some, it began in 1992.

I leave the patterns to you… and the expectations too. And what lies ahead from the powerful personalities of Generation Alpha, those born after 2010? Or Generation Beta, whose start is considered to be 2025…

The Boy Who Talks to the Blockchain

(Vitalik Buterin, 1994)

He is criminally young, skinny, introverted and a billionaire. And, more importantly, Vitalik Buterin made a promising technological revolution possible. He didn’t just create ether, the second most popular cryptocurrency after bitcoin, but something more—the largest blockchain platform. The first mass solution that made it possible for the blockchain to hold not just records of transactions, but entire small programs known as “smart contracts.”

Thanks to Buterin’s project, the possibilities of blockchain are now accessible as never before and limited only by programmers’ imagination.

The first version of Ethereum came to life in 2013, when Vitalik was 19. In May 2021, by then 27, he was officially declared a billionaire by Forbes—the youngest at the time—with a fortune of $1.4 billion.

He was born on January 31, 1994, in Kolomna, outside Moscow. At the time his mother, Natalia, was studying to become an economic analyst, and his father, Dmitry, was finishing a degree in computer science. Dmitry soon started working for an American computer firm, and thanks to his profession the family emigrated to Canada.

Dmitry gave his son his first computer when he was just 4. At 7 Vitalik was already creating his own virtual fairy-tale world populated by bunnies. At 10 he had a good command of the difficult programming language C++ and was working on amateur but polished computer games.

Having decided early on that blockchain had the power to change the world, at 17 Buterin was already co-founder and editor of Bitcoin Magazine. He took on the venture hoping to earn some money to buy bitcoins. He found it so fascinating that there was no time left for studying. He dropped out of university, like many heroes of the computer world.

A curious episode. The developers of the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency decided to give him, as thanks for his merits, 505 trillion coins with a market capitalization of $6.5 billion, about 10 percent of Bulgaria’s GDP. He officially thanked them for the gift but… then sent it to a nonexistent address, and the money simply vanished. He said the reason was security concerns and a wish to avoid speculation in subsequent transactions.

Little is known about his private life; there’s no word of a girlfriend. Buterin loves talking to the media for hours about blockchain and smart contracts. His personal website has no photo, but he publishes plenty of reflections, including on philosophy.

“The revolution the internet made can happen again,” he is convinced. “Human relationships can be turned upside down by removing the middleman not just from money transfers, as bitcoin allowed, but from every other sphere of our lives…”

(More about him—here.)

The Fallen Star

(SBF, or Sam Bankman-Fried, 1992)

This story is incredible proof of how fleeting fame is. And of how gullible people remain, even in the most technological of times. At the start of 2022, curly-haired Sam shone as a media hero, a celebrity, a sought-after interlocutor and… a multibillionaire, with a fortune of $22.5 billion! By the end of the year he was a laughingstock, the media’s favorite antihero, one of the main reasons blockchain technology sank into yet another winter.

Sam called himself SBF, by analogy with the company he co-founded—the crypto exchange FTX. Curiously, the other co-founder and tech lead, Gary Wang, bears no less blame for the incredible crash, yet he was spared the media wave that engulfed the ill-fated Sam.

It sounds like a fairy tale, and sooner or later Hollywood will give it its due. The crypto exchange in the Bahamas suddenly turned out to be a colossus with feet of clay; it emerged that Sam and his colleagues had boldly falsified documents to hide how badly the company was doing financially. (Meanwhile, from the outside it looked amazing—it paid $135 million just to have the Miami Heat basketball team’s arena named after it.) The company was valued at $32 billion… which all but vanished, quite literally, overnight.

And suddenly, when the tower collapsed, everyone’s eyes opened to how awful Sam was. It came out that while he was persuading investors to put their money into his venture, he had been calmly playing League of Legends on his computer. And, it turns out, he was mediocre even at the game.

Except it also came out that the investors had been positively impressed by this. Sam seemed much cooler and more down-to-earth to them when he accidentally showed the game window during a tense meeting. That meeting ended with a $200 million investment.

The collapse began on November 2, 2022, when it emerged that Sam’s company Alameda Research held $14.6 billion of its capital in… the cryptocurrency FTT, created by his own exchange, FTX. It quickly became clear that something was wrong; FTT lost a huge chunk of its market value—coins worth $70 fell to $4, a crash of almost 95 percent.

Everyone realized what was happening—that there was nothing behind Sam’s flourishing empire—and they began panic-dumping their assets in the company. It got to the point where even its main global competitor, Binance, tried to limit the damage, knowing it would hit the entire industry. But nothing could be done anymore; the company simply collapsed.

Today there is talk of bankruptcy and a series of lawsuits. Yet months earlier he was being flattered by politicians at the very highest level—Sam was among the biggest donors to the Democrats’ midterm election campaign.

“30-year-old crypto billionaire wants to give away his fortune,” read a Bloomberg headline a month before the collapse. And inside it went on: “Sam Bankman-Fried drives a Corolla, sleeps on a beanbag, and his life philosophy is akin to Robin Hood’s.” Well, they were certainly right about the comparison, at least. At least the first half of it—taking from the rich. He just never quite managed the second.

Does society create strong personalities, or is it the other way around? Are they a product of history, or its makers? We await the answers from the generations to come…

“The father of the computer was Bulgarian.” Some claims we accept as axioms and repeat over and over, often without realizing what stands behind them. Was he really Bulgarian? What exactly did John Atanasoff, part of a brilliant generation of scientists, create, and was his contribution truly decisive? Do we have reason to be proud of him, or is this just another of the historical clichés that surround us on every side?

All the important answers are in a book recently published in Bulgarian, The Man Who Invented the Computer. Its author, Jane Smiley, is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Starting from Iowa, the place where Atanasoff made his great breakthrough, she follows the inventor’s path. She tells the story of the decades in the middle of the last century when a number of remarkable scientists, step by step, fulfilled humanity’s age-old dream of a machine that could help us with countless tasks.

With his discovery, Atanasoff opened the door to today’s digital world.

What do you know about him? Here are eight curious details from the book, gathering some of the most important highlights of this story.

1. Is God Bulgarian?

…or at least his father was, to twist the old Bulgarian saying that God is Bulgarian. Even if we set aside the fact that, in his homeland, the father certainly did not see the best side of life. Today John Atanasoff’s name is carried by an asteroid, a peak in Antarctica and a street in Krastova Vada, a neighborhood of the capital, Sofia. But what is his connection to our country? Here is what Jane Smiley tells us.

“John Vincent Atanasoff’s father, Ivan, was born in 1876, at the height of a period of growing political upheaval. His parents lived in the Bulgarian village of Boyadzhik. The revolutionary movement in Bulgaria gathered strength in the 1870s, reaching its climax in the April Uprising of 1876, the great revolt against Ottoman rule.

The uprising was crushed with mass reprisals by the Ottoman authorities. Ivan’s parents, Atanas and Yana, were forced to flee the village. Atanas carried the baby Ivan in his arms. In the skirmish that broke out, Yana lost consciousness and Atanas was shot in the back. Atanas was killed, and

the bullet that pierced the father’s chest came out and grazed the baby’s head. Against all odds, Ivan and Yana survived.

Later Yana married a local stockbreeder, who managed to provide for little Ivan’s education, while her brother made contact with American missionaries, who helped him travel to America. When the uncle briefly returned to Bulgaria in the late 1880s, young Ivan, by then thirteen, decided to go with him to America. Yana raised the money for the journey by selling a piece of land inherited from Atanas. On Ellis Island, Ivan Atanasov’s name was changed to John.”

2. Cross-Stitch

There is no doubt that the inventor John Vincent Atanasoff, named after his father, had a special feeling for his father’s homeland. He came to Bulgaria in 1970 and 1985, already a universally recognized authority, and visited his father’s native village, Boyadzhik. The first asteroid discovered by the national observatory at Rozhen was also named after Atanasoff.

The inventor… certainly turned out to be an unconventional personality. Let us begin far from the spotlight of his great success, with some of his unusual hobbies. As a boy he loved knitting and sewed his own clothes. Later he supervised the construction of his own house and built its electrical and plumbing systems himself.

“John loved to make things and to show off his skills—in sixth grade, because some of the older girls who had already finished elementary school gathered at the back of the classroom to crochet, he learned to crochet like them. He kept it up at school—no longer bothered by the teasing, even spurred on by it—proud of his work and boasting of his skill, until the teacher banned crocheting. Soon he learned to sew as well. In fact, John Vincent Atanasoff seemed to see in every new idea or object a chance to explore and master everything the world around him had to offer.”

3. One Winter Day on the Highway

Did you know that the idea for his great discovery, the one for which we have all heard his name and call him (not without reason) “the father of the computer,” came to him… in a bar?

“On that December evening in 1937, Atanasoff jumped into his new Ford, and he later recalled: ‘I was in a terrible state of mind, because it was impossible to find a solution. I was simply worn out to the utmost degree.’ But he enjoyed his new car. He relished its speed and handling. It calmed him, and he felt a kind of suspension of time. ‘When I finally calmed down, I was crossing the Mississippi River, 304 kilometers from my workplace.’ The next thought that struck him was typical of his practical, straightforward nature: ‘Now you’ll have to give up this damn nonsense.’

At that moment he saw the sign of a roadhouse. He went inside, sat down and ordered a bourbon and soda. Music drifted from the radio behind the bar. Almost as soon as the waitress brought him his drink,

the essence of the computer appeared in his mind in its logical entirety, and he began to see both its component parts and the way they could be connected.

He jotted notes on a napkin, but later he didn’t need them, because he had pictured and thought through his machine so thoroughly that he easily remembered what he had come up with. He stayed in the bar for several hours, working through each of his concepts, but concentrating above all on how the memory would work and how the electronic on-off process would calculate.”

4. Death Is a Lonely Business

Then he had the patience and the luck to turn his idea into a prototype that actually worked. His work won him the trust of Iowa State, which brought him a modest budget as well as the chance to hire an assistant. Atanasoff chose the young Clifford Berry, and over the following years the two of them built the prototype of the ABC, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer. The machine converted decimal numbers into binary and performed arithmetic operations, which it stored in its memory.

What followed was a cavalcade of new great steps before we arrived at today’s sophisticated devices. And yet, as even the book’s title suggests, one man took the most important step of all.

For many years the issue was fiercely disputed. Meanwhile, World War II had begun and ended, and Atanasoff spent a long time working on military technology. Afterward he built a successful consulting business, and the story of how he created the grandfather of today’s computers stayed in his past.

Until it resurfaced, most unexpectedly. The recognition that Atanasoff and Berry were the pioneers of the field came as the result of a sweeping commercial lawsuit. When it began, Clifford Berry had departed this world while still young. And it was precisely this that drove Atanasoff to take an active part in the search for the truth…

“To the end of her life, Berry’s wife believed that he had been murdered. Others shared her conviction. Kirwan Cox, the Canadian film producer who researched Atanasoff and Berry and conducted numerous interviews, maintains that whether or not Berry was murdered, the undeniable result of his death was its enormous impact on Atanasoff. Before Berry’s death, he had not wanted to discuss the ABC, because he was too upset by the destruction of the prototype. But he believed that Berry had been murdered and that he would not have lost his life had he not been hired to work on the machine. Berry’s death changed his attitude toward the patent litigation, and he became very energetic in the fight to resolve the patent conflict.”

5. Lawsuits and Papers

Around the time our two heroes were developing their famous prototype, they had a visit from another of the great scientists of that generation, John Mauchly. Before long he created his own version, and in the years that followed companies began developing the next steps, some of them protected by patents.

It was just such a commercial dispute that suddenly proved important and revealed the truth unequivocally. The question at its heart was mainly this: was the Atanasoff–Berry prototype working when Mauchly visited them, or not? If it was, it would have been the first computer, and Mauchly had simply copied it. Gradually things fell into place, the evidence came to light, and in 1973 the court handed down the ruling that definitively established that the ABC had performed accurate calculations and was the first prototype of what would become today’s computer.

But as the researcher Prof. Vladimir Getov notes, “the Watergate scandal broke on the same date the federal court’s ruling was published. That robbed John Atanasoff of the front-page columns of the morning papers, and with them the first minutes of well-deserved fame.”

“Over time, during the twentieth century, Atanasoff received growing recognition for inventing the computer (although he is left out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s website). In 1974 he was honored by the state of Iowa, and in 1989 Arthur Burks and Alice Rowe Burks, who had worked on the ENIAC, published his detailed biography.

In 1990 Atanasoff was invited to the White House, and George Bush presented him with the 1990 National Medal of Technology ‘for his invention of the electronic digital computer and for contributions toward the development of a technically trained U.S. work force.’ In the 1980s he was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but because his paper—a 35-page description of the ABC—and his other articles on the theoretical and technical aspects of the ABC had never been published, he did not meet the requirements. Atanasoff died on June 15, 1995.”

6. A Sin Confessed

How did this belated recognition change his life? And what kind of person was the father of the computer? As gentle and likable as his photographs might suggest? Not exactly. Apparently, from a certain point on, his Bulgarian genes began speaking up more often.

“When Judge Larson delivered his ruling, Atanasoff was exactly 70 years old. He was still extremely active on his farm in Maryland and busy with his wife, Alice, his three children and his grandchildren. Just how busy becomes clear from a letter written by Atanasoff’s mother, Iva (by then nearly a hundred), after she moved to the farm in the mid-1980s: ‘Vincent… wants me to walk every day to the gate, 780 meters away, even when it’s below freezing outside. I have a bell that rings every hour so that I’ll get up and walk around.’ Iva came to enjoy her outings in the cold, although one day, when snow was drifting, she persuaded Alice to intercede for her with her son.

As for Atanasoff himself, she wrote: ‘He spends a quarter of his time lecturing me on the enormous need to eat less, drink more and walk more. The other three quarters… he spends in his workshop. All we hear is creaking and squeaking. I asked him what he was making, and he told me: a boat. I assumed it was a small pleasure boat, but I wondered, because he has no interest in fishing. But he told me it would be as big as a house.’

“Retirement mellowed Atanasoff very little, and he remained active and challenging toward those around him. One reporter described him as ‘creative and cantankerous,’ and his daughter Joanne believed that ‘his favorite pastime was conflict’… ‘He liked to test people, and he loved drawing his friends and family into intense discussions or arguments as a way of assessing their mental abilities… he kept track of his grandchildren’s schoolwork, and when we visited he set aside time to quiz us on the material.’”

7. On the Letters

It turns out that in his final years one of the inventor’s great passions was linguistics. Coincidence or not, today it is precisely through large language models—the meeting point of technology and words—that we are seeing progress in artificial intelligence, the great topic of our day.

“Atanasoff’s true passion at the end of his life was language and alphabets. He considered the Bulgarian version of the Cyrillic alphabet—with thirty-two letters until 1945, and thirty after that—superior to the English alphabet, and when interested groups asked him to speak about the invention of the computer, he would try to steer the conversation toward the benefits of reinventing the alphabet. In 1985 he told a Bulgarian newspaper: ‘I hear them, I hear the voices and the hearts of the people who pronounce them… I want every letter, every symbol to carry more meanings, to keep the alphabet at full strength.’”

8. Dream On

“In many respects John Vincent Atanasoff was a lucky man. He lived to see recognition for his hard work and his enterprising mind. Throughout his long life he tried many things, and thanks to his energy, his organizational skills and his persistence, he achieved everything he attempted. Atanasoff would probably have said that he had managed something very rare. Namely, to do what he wanted, the way he wanted, and to discover that the way he had wanted to do it really was the best,” writes Jane Smiley.

And truly… a person is only as big as their dreams. In technological times we can dream more and more, and achieve what until recently seemed unreal. But do we?

It is worth pausing to reflect on the lesson from the story of John Atanasoff, “the father of the computer”…

Play the video

“The best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question. It is far more effective to post the wrong answer.” And everyone will rush to correct you, to jump into the argument, right?

That is exactly what “Cunningham’s Law” says, a fascinating rule about how online communication has changed us. But who is this Cunningham? His story is an interesting and instructive one. One of the pioneers of the democratic internet, he paved the way for Wikipedia and for the systems we use to share opinions online. And if you have ever wondered where the free encyclopedia got its name, he is the one who came up with it, after an unexpected episode.

Our hero’s contribution to the way we develop software is enormous. Besides being one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, which laid down the foundations of today’s IT industry, Ward Cunningham gave us concepts that are used everywhere these days, such as technical debt and extreme programming.

And yet today you will find only a handful of lines about him online, repeated over and over. So it is time to dig into the story of one of the pioneers, one of the fascinating figures who stood on the bright side of the tech world. The ones we have to thank for the internet still being a free platform. One where, despite the relentless and ever-deepening dominance of the giants, there is always room for everyone’s opinion…

Wiki, Wiki Way

The early 1990s. Howard Cunningham and his wife have set off on a long-awaited trip to Hawaii. The two are among the pioneers of computer technology; they met at university in the 1970s, at a student party after a tough exam. Back then computing was not even taught as a separate discipline, and the two studied electrical engineering combined with software. After graduating, they founded a company together, helping the pioneering firms that had decided to use the grandfathers of today’s computers in their daily work.

But work stayed at home. The couple landed at the airport in the capital, Honolulu, where an unheard-of heat was waiting for them. They hurried outside to find quick transport to the hotel, and in front of them stood two little shuttle buses. With big, proud signs… “Wiki” and “Wiki Wiki.” What on earth could that mean, Ward wondered. It turned out that in the local language the word means “quick,” and saying it twice translates as “even quicker.” It was the first Hawaiian word Ward ever heard (and probably the last one he learned), but it struck him as especially colorful.

We will leave it to the experts in Hawaiian to tell us whether more repetitions would make things faster still, but the vacation in Hawaii certainly went by quickly for the Cunninghams.

The two came home, and when Ward went back to the side project he was building in his spare time, he remembered the “wiki” buses and decided to name it after them: “WikiWikiWeb.” Just a few years later the word would become famous as part of “Wikipedia,” the universal place where we so often look for an independent view today. One of the symbols of the democratic internet, of the attempt at impartiality, of the ideal of equality online, which so often finds itself in a decisive battle with the ideas of the big players…

Hakuna Matata!

And although our hero had no direct part in creating the free encyclopedia itself, he is not only its godfather (the origin of names in the tech world can be truly curious) but also its forerunner. It was his system with the two “wikis” that laid the foundation. It let people gather and add to information at the same time, and discuss it in a way that was traceable, clear and well argued. And all of this… so that we could build better software.

That is the big dream Ward Cunningham keeps chasing even today, now past 70. As he tells it, back in the 1970s computer science was already looming as a great challenge, yet its real foundations had not been laid. Hardware development was moving ahead, engineering practices were being introduced, computers were getting faster and faster, while writing programs happened chaotically, without organization, leaving behind serious problems that were far harder to solve later on.

Ward learned about the network that would become the internet shortly after it was developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s team. And he quickly began dreaming of a global platform that would let us exchange information at unprecedented speed.

He built his first website in 1993, when the internet was anything but fast. It would take another decade before speeds were good enough for us to swap files casually with the other side of the world.

Go, Wiki, Go!

Ward’s first site was exactly that platform, where he invited like-minded people to discuss the problems and big questions of software development. And when, a year later, he hit on a technical way to let any visitor add to the information, he remembered the trip and Honolulu’s quick little buses. And so WikiWikiWeb was born—a site where programmers discussed and added to each other’s ideas… quickly, at least by the speeds the network was capable of back then.

Gradually, after the first “wiki,” thousands of others would appear, tied to different communities. Ward would offer the platform to anyone who wanted to use it, because, as he says himself, it never occurred to him that this was something that could be patented. “Wiki” would become a synonym for a collection of information on a given subject, even before the next generation of computer enthusiasts took the idea further and turned it into “Wikipedia,” an “encyclopedia of everything.”

What is a wiki? “In its simplest form, it is a website that respects the intellectual creativity of the reader,” Cunningham says. “It says that this person reading the site might know something I don’t know. And when he knows it, if he’s willing to give it, we’re willing to take it. It says: ‘We are having a conversation.’ Isn’t that cool? That is what our culture is built on—trust between us.”

It was in that first wiki that Ward put forward another of the ideas that earned him a place in the history of computer science. In recent years there has been a lot of talk about “extreme programming,” an approach used to develop software above all when it has to happen fast, for example in startups.

The Extremist in Glasses

But… what could extreme programming possibly mean? Skiing down a slope while writing your code, or bench-pressing a hundred kilos? That would be interesting, but, as you might guess from Ward’s photos, that is not quite the idea.

In fact, it is a fairly broad concept in which programmers develop their product in short cycles, with higher productivity that comes neither at the expense of quality nor, as the name might mislead us into thinking, at the expense of stress.

Another idea from extreme programming is writing code in pairs (could it be a coincidence that Ward has been working alongside his wife for 50 years?). The ideals include simple code and frequent communication within the team. And if you are wondering where the extreme part comes in… the idea is that the very practices Ward and his like-minded colleagues considered most useful in building software are taken to extreme levels.

Even people from the software world may never have heard of extreme programming, but whether you know one particular little word from our hero’s experience is a sure sign of whether you have ever brushed up against the industry. In recent years, being “agile” has become a mantra repeated everywhere you turn. The concept, which we might render as “flexible” software development, came at the start of the new millennium from a short, clear yet general manifesto written by leading lights of the industry. The “Ten Commandments” for programmers are actually… twelve. Principles such as “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “working software over comprehensive documentation.”

These days you will hardly hear of a software team, at least in our part of the world, that does not follow the tenets formulated by 17 “wise heads” in 2001 (you can find the official Bulgarian translation here). Perhaps the best known among the signatories are Robert Martin, familiar to visitors of Digital Stories as Uncle Bob, Martin Fowler and, of course, our hero today.

Although throughout his long career he never stopped working for the family company, he joined many other ventures along the way. And while most of them were smaller projects, away from the mainstream, it is worth noting that he spent two years at Microsoft in the Patterns & Practices group. How many good practices he managed to introduce we can only guess, given that he did not manage to stay in that job for very long.

Debt Calls

Owing someone money… for many it is a nightmare, for others everyday life. And so we come to another huge and very important concept formulated and popularized by Ward—so-called technical debt.

All too often, in a hurry and driven by the need to keep adding new features to the software, its creators settle for compromises. They leave lines of code that could have been written more clearly, they make judgment calls that are far from optimal. And so, slowly but surely, this burden accumulates—a measure our hero was the first to popularize.

Today we all witness the enormous tons of technical debt piled up by the biggest software companies. Massive projects with billions of users often fail because of small bugs, do not work as expected, become vulnerable to cyberattacks. Ward predicted this phenomenon back in the days before the internet conquered the world. And he put it clearly: every software team should keep track of the technical debt it accumulates and take measures periodically. So that code already written gets improved, adapted, updated… The opposite of what the traditional programmer’s wisdom says: “if it works, don’t touch it.”

Well, with views like these we can guess why Ward never made it big among the Silicon Valley giants, who are always in a rush, rush, rush, chasing new software features… and billions.

No Credit, to Anyone!

And so, despite all his remarkable achievements and his contribution to the way we build software today, you are far more likely to come across his name as part of “Cunningham’s Law,” which we started with. But how did a programmer become famous for the thought that “The best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question. It is far more effective to post the wrong answer”? It is not his fault.

Some trace the roots of the law back to antiquity. In Plato’s dialogue Meno, for example, Socrates agrees with the mistaken conclusions of his friend Meno, hoping that this will keep the conversation going. Either way, the principle still works flawlessly on Facebook, because people often love to look smarter than others. And online they get the chance to show it in full force (although sometimes the result is the opposite).

While he admits that the popularity of the “law” flatters him, the programmer believes the rule refutes itself by how often it is misquoted online. In fact, the wording was proposed by Steven McGeady, a longtime leader at the microprocessor maker Intel.

Ward’s Word

Steven recalls how in the 1980s Ward gave him this piece of advice about communicating in the ancestors of today’s forums. Our hero later said he had been misquoted, but that did not stop the law from becoming more famous than his real achievements. He himself considers the wiki platform his greatest contribution and believes that it is what will be carved on his tombstone.

Because it helps us share, work together, complement one another—something that is getting harder and harder these days, he notes. “Sometimes, when you work in a team, you have to trust people more than you have reason to,” Cunningham says. “And it works, because most people are good.”

This comes from a man driven forward by technology his whole life. Who back in the 1990s lived in a house with several internal networks, where every resident, even the cat, had a website. And computers lay scattered around the way magazines lie open in most homes, as a journalist who visited the programmer aptly put it.

“Ward has always been a social type,” says his wife, Karen. “He is especially interested in meeting people who challenge his thinking or inspire his intellectual curiosity. For quite a while now his real focus has been on communities, on ways of using technology to build them.”

Simply Ward

“I really do think programming is an easy and fun thing to do,” Ward says.

“Those who find it hard and boring just need to get a little more experience.”

And if there is one more thing from his professional biography worth mentioning before we part, it is that Ward is among the people who spent many years championing the “little” programming language Smalltalk. (More about it here.) A language whose syntax is so concise it fits on a postcard turns out to be extremely handy in a whole range of situations.

Because, as our hero likes to repeat, simplicity should be a fundamental rule in the work of people who build software. Simple solutions are the most elegant, the most understandable, the easiest to maintain. And every complication that can be avoided is worth avoiding.

“What is simplicity? The shortest path to a solution,” he says. “Actually, I enjoy complexity that empowers me. If it challenges me, it’s very pleasant. But sometimes I have to deal with complexity that disempowers me. The complexity we despise is the kind that leads to needless difficulty.”

And come to think of it… for the software world this is beyond dispute. But might it not also be a wonderful rule for life?

This piece was prepared with the special assistance of Irina Marudina.

Where is freedom today? Where it has always been: in ideals. And in the deeds of the ever fewer people for whom it remains a cause, not a hollow cliché.

After a 14-year battle that at many moments looked doomed, Odysseus has finally returned to Ithaca. The private jet landed in the Australian capital, Canberra. Out stepped the white-haired, charismatic man known all over the world, and he waved to the journalists and well-wishers who had gathered. Then he embraced his two young children, whom he was seeing in freedom for the first time, far from the oppressive bars…

The heroes of the past fought for freedom. For the independence of their peoples, against slavery and injustice. And today's heroes, the ones future generations will honor? If there is a tomorrow, it will mean they have won, however unlikely that may seem.

Today's heroes fight for freedom too. Alas, they are neither as many nor as well known. But if there is one whose battle for the truth has reached a great many people, it is without a doubt our hero today. Julian Assange has become a legend, a symbol. And his story is so thrilling and so full of twists that it is worth digging into. Along the way, we will let him speak through a few important quotes that, I hope, will make more people think about the truly important issues of our day. The very issues Digital Stories exists for…

Nothing to Lose but Their Chains

“Who am I? A freedom fighter deprived of all freedom. A fighter for free speech who has been denied all speech. A fighter for the truth who has become the target of a thousand lies.”

You cannot have missed the Australian with the hair gone white since youth and the somehow childlike gaze. A journalist, a programmer, a champion of the truth who managed to drag into the light some of the most closely guarded dirty secrets of the world's hegemon. And who then entered a legal battle that was all too likely to end in a 175-year prison sentence, precisely because he had done his duty. After 7 years in a cramped little room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and another 5 in an even more cramped prison cell. After years of risking his life and liberty, Assange came home a winner.

His previous stop was a small courtroom on the small and faraway island of Saipan, where the local judge, representing the United States in the territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, approved the deal between Assange and the prosecution. He pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of 5 years, which he had already served. “It appears you will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” declared Judge Ramona Manglona, for whom this was the great chance of a lifetime to step into the spotlight.

My People????

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”

Unlike Assange. Used from childhood to fighting for what he believes in. Showing incredible resilience in his battle against the justice system, against the most powerful states, against absolutely everyone…

What might the price of this deal be?

Before we ponder that, let us go back quite a way, before the story of the documents, the embassy and the prison, which dragged on for an unusually long time by the standards of our age, when everything happens so fast…

Big brother

“The first thing to understand is that a person is either a participant in history or its victim. There is no other option.”

Julian's parents split up before he was even born. His mother, Ann Hawkins, was a visual artist; his father, John Shipton, a builder and anti-war activist.

When Julian was 8, his mother married the actor Brett Assange, owner of a small theater company… It was him the rebel would come to accept as his father, and his surname that he would make famous, even though Brett and his mother parted ways when our hero was only 9.

“Brett Assange was the male figure I related to, the good father. One of those cool people from the seventies who were into guitars and everything to do with the music scene. The name Assange is unusual; it comes from Mr. Sang, or ‘Ah Sang’ in Cantonese, because his great-great-grandfather was a Taiwanese pirate,” our hero recounts.

Defying all the stereotypes, his real father would return to his life later. Together with his half-brother, he would make a film called Ithaka, in the very hope of helping Julian one day win his battle with the justice system and come home… Of course, many of the details remain unknown; Julian keeps his private life far from the world, and piecing together the fragments of stories like his will certainly be a challenge for the future. If history survives as a discipline capable enough to record what happens in digital times…

Stranger in a Strange Land

“People often ask, ‘What should I do?’ The answer is not so difficult. Learn how the world works. Challenge the statements, actions and intentions of those who seek to control us behind the facades of democracy or monarchy. Unite around a common goal and a common principle to design, build, document, finance and defend. Learn. Challenge. Act. Now.”

Shortly after her second divorce, his mother married Leif Meinel, a founder of The Family—a local sect, as Julian calls it. The marriage did not last long; she became pregnant, felt hunted and fled, beginning to roam Australia with her son, from state to state… “That's how we started moving. Nomadism suits some people, some situations. We just kept moving; my mother would get a job in a new town and we'd find a place to live there.”

Over the following years, by his own account, they would pass through more than 50 towns, and he would attend 37 schools.

From an early age he stood out as a skilled programmer. He wanted “to break down the barriers to knowledge.” At 8 he was interested in philosophy and mathematics, and by 11 he had already mastered the capabilities of one of the grandfathers of today's computers—the Commodore 64.

But his childhood was much more than that. In rural Australia, he says, he lived like Tom Sawyer—riding horses, exploring caves, fishing, diving, riding motorbikes.

In high school they called him “the Professor.” He liked to boast that at 15 he could “crack encryption systems used to stop people sharing software,” which would later help him with “systems used to hide information in government computers.”

The Monastery Is Too Narrow for My Soul

“The future of humanity is the struggle between humans who control machines and machines who control humans; between the democratization of communication and the usurpation of communication by artificial intelligence.”

Then, almost imperceptibly, he grew up and was ready to travel on his own. He slung his most important belongings over his shoulder and set out to discover the world, hippie-style, hitchhiking, sometimes without papers, under various made-up names. On and on he roamed, as if racking up the miles for the years he would have to spend in the little room at the embassy and in a cell in the high-security Belmarsh prison.

In all the commotion he had dropped out of high school; he was already 32 when he finished it and enrolled to study mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne…

He did not graduate, because by then a chance to change the world had opened up before him.

Julian first stepped into the spotlight precisely as a hacker. At only 16 he was operating under the handle Mendax when he and two friends were put on trial for hacking. They mostly used social engineering; they did not abuse the information or profit from it, they only shared it, and that is what would save them. And although they hacked institutions such as the Pentagon, Citibank, Motorola, Panasonic, NASA and the U.S. Navy, they got away with it. They signed an agreement with the court, pleading guilty and receiving only a suspended sentence in return. Sounds like history repeating itself, doesn't it?

At the Tip of the Spear

“Real democracy is not the White House. Real democracy is not Canberra. Real democracy is the resistance of people armed with the truth against lies, from Tahrir to London. Every day ordinary people teach us that democracy is free speech and protest. Because once we, the people, stop speaking openly and stop resisting, once we turn our attention elsewhere or grow complacent, once we turn away from one another, we are no longer free.”

Next he took the lead in the cypherpunk movement. Behind the rather catchy name lies a community of people pursuing “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful,” who use “mathematics and programming to create a brake on government power.” The cypherpunks advocate the widespread use of cryptographic technologies as a way to protect basic human freedoms.

All of this soon came to life in WikiLeaks—the organization Julian and three like-minded people founded in 2006 with the idea of creating “the rebels' Library of Alexandria.” A rich collection of information that could not be found anywhere else, gathered in an easily searchable form so as to keep watch on how today's institutions do their jobs.

Although the first part of the word, “wiki,” is used for collections of information that anyone can add to, the idea here is different—a media outlet of sorts, able to meet the needs of a new age. The second part hints at this: “leaks,” from the English term for information escaping where it shouldn't.

According to Assange, WikiLeaks rests on the idea of “scientific journalism—that every piece of information should be cited precisely, with the original source. As much of the information as possible should be put in the public domain so people can examine it, just as in science, so you can check for yourself whether the conclusion follows from the experimental data.”

Publish or Perish

“I see that there is now a militarization of cyberspace, in the sense of a military occupation. When you communicate over the internet, when you communicate using mobile phones, which are now meshed with the internet, your communications are being intercepted by military intelligence organizations. It's like having a tank in your bedroom.”

During one interview Assange was asked to give a mathematical formula for WikiLeaks, and he wrote three words on a sheet of paper: “Publish or perish.”

In just a few years the modest venture turned into a phenomenon that bears no comparison with anything. The documents it revealed led to massive journalistic investigations and political upheavals. Even to wars, to the ending of wars, to changes of government in a number of countries. To date WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents, many of which, you can be sure, were not exactly welcome news to the governments of the world.

Including the government of today's global hegemon. It is no accident that in the years that followed, Assange and his associates were subjected to a sweeping, unprecedented campaign in which they were smeared, discredited and, worst of all, prosecuted, stubbornly and shamelessly, on a string of obviously fabricated charges, as well as on charges that were in fact examples of free speech in its purest form.

The Truth Shall Make You Free

“Everything else flows from the revealing of the truth. Our buildings can only be as tall as their bricks are strong. Our civilization can only be as strong as its ideas are true.”

“We created WikiLeaks to make capitalism freer and more ethical and to expose injustice, not to be neutral,” Assange also says. Publications from the platform have been cited in more than 28,000 academic papers and U.S. court decisions.

Among the most striking collections of information is the Afghan War Diary, containing 90,000 often harrowing reports on the deadly actions of the U.S. military. For the Iraq war, nearly 400,000 field reports were published, exposing war crimes and testifying to the enormous number of civilians killed.

It is no exaggeration to say that the two collections also led to the end of the hostilities and the gradual U.S. withdrawal under public pressure. And perhaps this is also why, in recent years, the global hegemon's policy has shifted toward not intervening directly in military conflicts. Alas, war crimes around the world have not ended, but if at least a few more conscientious journalists worked on the scale of our hero… that would be no utopia at all.

Under the name Cablegate, more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables were published, sparking scandals in many parts of the world. The Guantánamo Files told of the inhuman torture inflicted on detainees, while the Spy Files revealed many cases of mass global surveillance, including of leading politicians. One of the latest major scandals was the publication of Hillary Clinton's emails, which to a large extent brought about the end of her political career and today's chaotic state of American politics.

With a Bare Knife in Hand

“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded that we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire ‘international community.’ We kept publishing. They put me in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA, got Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, won, and secured him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us, but she herself was destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with a piece of string. Or perhaps there are no elephants?”

Of course, because of this enormous list, Assange and his associates are often accused of collaborating with other states, Russia in particular, of political manipulation and who knows what else. For many years the Australian faced extradition to Sweden on charges of raping two of WikiLeaks' female associates. Later the testimony turned out to be rather dubious, as did the backgrounds of the accusers, and the case was dropped.

Because of the WikiLeaks revelations, one of its main “suppliers” of information, Bradley Manning, spent some time in an American prison before reaching a deal with the prosecution and walking free, by then with a different name and even gender—as Chelsea Manning. Edward Snowden, for his part, still lives in Moscow, fearing the consequences of having simply told and shown what the authorities in his own homeland were doing. Incidentally, Snowden calls Assange “one of the most far-sighted thinkers in technology, constantly ahead of the curve.”

Crocodile Dundee

“With digital archives, with these digital repositories of our intellectual history, control of the present makes possible an absolutely untraceable removal of the past. More than ever, the past can be made to disappear entirely, completely and irrevocably, without anyone noticing.”

Thanks to Assange, the now popular term whistleblower came into wide use—the person who blows the whistle. Who has the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes. Who has the integrity to expose the huge wrongdoings that go on in states, companies and society and remain hidden.

Though he was the symbol of the venture, Assange always said WikiLeaks was a team effort. And yet the logical thing happened: in June 2012, when he was about to be sent to prison and no longer had any chance of escaping the persecution, he found refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The then president of the small South American country, Rafael Correa, had the courage to shelter the rebel, granting him political asylum and later citizenship.

But if that sounds like salvation, it is only fair to say that the Ecuadorian embassy, which became a field of major political upheaval, turned out to be a 30-square-meter apartment in which Julian, used to roaming the world since childhood, was forced to spend 7 years with 5.5 square meters for his personal use. “My access to the outdoors, to sunlight, is forbidden by the British authorities,” Assange said. “As is the possibility of going to a hospital. I have managed to use the ground-floor balcony only three times, taking a certain risk, and I have not even been allowed outside to exercise. The Ecuadorian embassy, which honors me with its generosity and courage, which probably saved my life, is simply an apartment used by a dozen diplomats and staff who cannot abandon their mission.”

And yet things got even worse for him after the government in Ecuador changed and the new president, far more pro-American, slowly but surely saw to it that the guest was handed over to the British authorities.

The Truth and Nothing but the Truth

“The greater the power, the greater the need for transparency, because if power is abused, the result can be monstrous. On the other hand, when people have no power, we should not diminish their power further by making them even more transparent.”

So Assange ended up in the special-regime Belmarsh prison in London for the next 5 years, during which long, epic legal battles were to decide his future.

There were many fears that he would not survive, even at the very highest level. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, visited Assange with two doctors and concluded that “Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.”

To round out the plot, we must not leave out that during this time Julian married his longtime partner Stella Moris, a French citizen and part of the legal team fighting for his release. The wedding took place before four witnesses, two of them the official witnesses and the other two minors. These were Julian and Stella's sons, Gabriel and Max, who are now 7 and 5. Evidently the cramped personal space of the Ecuadorian embassy was enough for more than just a love to be born…

Julian is believed to have another son who is considerably older. And according to rumor, he may have many other children too, but… the many rumors only go to show what a legend the Australian has become over the past decades.

Against a Sea of Troubles

“The merging of our societies with the internet and of the internet with our societies has enabled a truly astonishing horizontal transfer of information, in which we can learn from one another far more than we ever could. On the other hand, it has allowed state intelligence organizations and the contractors who work for them to collect more information. In a sense, it is the greatest theft of wealth that has ever taken place.”

Before we part, it is time for two curious touches. Assange appeared in the classic series The Simpsons in 2012, voicing… himself in the landmark 500th episode. His voice was recorded over the phone while he was shut away in the Ecuadorian embassy.

After that, a character inspired by Assange was included in an Asterix and Obelix comic. Confoundtheirpolitix, an “international news crier,” appeared in the 36th album of the series, with the blessing of the comic's legendary creators—the artist Albert Uderzo himself and the heirs of René Goscinny. Before publishing his Commentaries on the Gallic War, Julius Caesar decides to remove the chapter recounting the defeat he suffered at the hands of the Gauls. A scribe named Bigdata (the modern term for data) passes this censored chapter to Confoundtheirpolitix.

“It's better than a Nobel Prize. Far more people have received one than have become characters in Asterix,” Julian said with a smile. Clearly not without irony at the fact that the supposedly greatest prize for peace, for which he was nominated no fewer than 8 times, has often gone to open warmongers and people who unleashed bloody conflicts.

Freedom or Death

“If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with people like us, whose hearts and minds we can be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the beginnings of our stories in their ears, and their endings all around them in their wandering eyes. The whole universe, or the structure that perceives it, is a worthy opponent, but try as I may, I cannot escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will find comfort wandering through some laboratory, talking softly with students on summer evenings, and will accept suffering with nonchalance. But not now. Men in their prime, if they have convictions, are obliged to act on them.”

And so came the long-awaited freedom, about which we have yet to learn more (or perhaps we never will). The day before, news broke that Julian had struck a deal with the U.S. government to plead guilty and receive a symbolic sentence for time already served, set against the 175 years in prison that had threatened him.

But what matters more is that Assange has at last embraced his kids in his native Australia. We are left to guess what he gave in exchange for the freedom he waited so long for.

And yet, after everything said so far, I personally cannot believe that he has given up and committed to stop publishing. I believe that, even as the years go by and the weariness piles up, there will be more WikiLeaks to come. That the battle for truth and freedom does not stop here.

It is a daily battle, relentless but essential. Each of us ought to fight it, even with ourselves. And may more people come to realize it…

It is very easy to tell someone who has ever programmed from everyone else: if you have ever “touched” code, there is simply no way you haven't seen Stack Overflow. In just 15 years, the question-and-answer site fundamentally changed the way programmers work. It became a Mecca for software engineers, a safe harbor for almost every one of their everyday problems.

Today, however, the legend is heading toward its sunset. And, by a twist of fate, because of the very technological progress it made possible…

What's more, many predict that the project's decline will bring serious problems for the next generations of programmers.

The story of Stack Overflow says a lot about where we stand today in the world of technology. About the breakneck speed at which we are changing. About the seeds, the good ideas that can only sprout if they land in the right soil at the right moment. And about how quickly a giant that seemed unshakable only yesterday turns into a shadow of itself.

Thus Passes the Glory of the World

“Well, technology has come a long way since the days of forums. I think the programming community can do a lot better with a combination of a question-and-answer site where people vote for the most accurate answer and where answers can be edited.” So wrote Joel Spolsky on September 15, 2008, in the blog post announcing the creation of the famous site.

By yet another twist of fate, before it became programmers' best helper, the phrase Stack Overflow itself carried decidedly unpleasant associations. It is the name of an error in which part of the memory is overloaded and the program stops running. That is precisely why the name was chosen, after a vote among the people who saw the point of the venture.

It is such a common scenario in the trade. An error pops up, for some reason the computer isn't doing what it's supposed to… and, of course, if you don't know what's going on, the first thing you do is check online.

Don't Ask!

That turned out to be almost impossible before the famous site appeared.

“You know what drives me crazy? Programming question-and-answer sites,” Spolsky wrote in his famous post. “You know what I'm talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get:

• a bunch of links to forums where clueless people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere;
• a link to another Q&A site that claims to have the answer, but when you get there, it asks you to sign up for a paid subscription plan;
• an old post with the exact answer for Windows 3.1, which just doesn't work anymore;
• something in Japanese.

If you're really lucky, on page four you'll find a discussion with hundreds of replies, 25 percent of which are spam ads posted by bots; some of the replies are actually useful, and someone named “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent, if ungrammatical, answer that nevertheless contains a devastating security bug. And this little gem is buried under a truckload of garbage.”

Alone Against All

Well, into the middle of all this, exactly where it was needed, came Stack Overflow. There is no more precise way to put it. Suddenly there was a place online where anyone could quickly and easily find the solution to any problem related to building software.

At first glance, a plain site, retro-looking even for its time. Supposedly just a forum where anyone can ask and answer questions, but in reality much more.

The idea is brilliantly simple. Not only is everyone welcome to ask and answer, but the whole thing turns into a kind of game: the authors of the best answers rack up points. Every question that repeats one already asked is closed and redirected to the original. Every answer is rated, and if the person who asked becomes convinced they have received a correct, working and precise solution, they mark the answer that proved most useful, and it stands out visibly from the rest.

And at the very top of the answers appears His Majesty: the answer that has collected the most votes from registered users.

Posts can be edited, so they can be developed and enriched further. “There are lots of good ways to edit,” Spolsky wrote. “You can improve the spelling, the grammar and the meaning. Anything you can do to clarify, explain or improve the question or answer will serve the community. If there's code, you can run it yourself, refactor it or improve it. After all, for the next 20 years, this question will be the canonical place on the web where programmers come to learn exactly this thing.”

That last sentence became a prophecy: that is exactly what happened with some of the most common searches.

A few hundred programmers quickly joined the venture as volunteers. They all shared the need for a new site, and the timing coincided with the main forum of the day, ExpertExchange, going paid. Alongside Spolsky, the other main founder was Jeff Atwood, creator of the blog “Coding Horror.”

Ask, and It Shall Be Given You

The system gathered speed very quickly because of the way Google worked back then. The most fitting answers soon rose to the top positions, because the people who found a solution in them stayed a long time and left satisfied.

Spolsky's post began an entire era in software development. In 2017, when I was entering the profession, the site was the indispensable helper for every problem. So much so that at the software academy where I studied, we overloaded the traffic to it, our access was temporarily restricted, and… the exam had to be extended.

The site became a kind of encyclopedia for the community, where you could find the answer to any question, and such questions crop up daily in a programmer's work.

Not everyone has time to read huge documentation, which is often unclear and leaves out real-world applications… so salvation turned out to be shared experience. The chance, once you have stumbled over an obstacle and managed to get past it, to help the next person who is about to trip and fall.

To the Blackboard!

Questions are sorted by the technologies they relate to, and the database grows at a dizzying pace. Annual surveys begin, showing that almost 100 percent of programmers use the forum. Then this becomes a way to study trends, to track which technologies the people on Stack Overflow use and what gives them trouble. Which technologies are most in demand and best paid, and what the trends are in computing worldwide.

A few more words about Spolsky. He is also known for “Shlemiel the painter's algorithm,” which grew out of an old Jewish joke and describes how programmers write inefficient code because they don't understand the fundamental, basic layers of their work. But to keep a balance between the good and the bad, Silicon Valley also considers him the creator of the modern way the industry hires people.

Joel worked at Microsoft in the days when graduates of the most prestigious universities landed at the big software companies by default. He did the opposite: he introduced a strict filter of algorithmic problems, questions on general computer knowledge and multi-round interviews. Something he himself now considers a serious mistake, since software development is too complex, a team sport that requires a much wider, sometimes unexpected range of skills.

Phone a Friend

There is a curious study by the University of Maryland, according to which developers who use Stack Overflow as an advisor write less secure code, but code that is significantly more functional. In my view, though, the lines simply blur: intelligent software engineers also use it intelligently, as a source of information, approaching it critically and looking for the logic. Which, by the way, is exactly what matters in the age of artificial intelligence, too.

Gradually, a whole group of similar sites was created under the Stack Exchange “umbrella.” The approach proved so successful that question-and-answer pages appeared in many different fields, even outside the computer world.

Almost imperceptibly, the whole culture that accompanies any phenomenon of this scale was born. People with high ratings, who had given accurate answers and been recognized by the community, became celebrities in the programming world; their stars were a guarantee of quality. So much so that when Bulgaria became the first country where someone from Stack Overflow's top 40 became a minister, it made news widely covered across the software world.

And, of course, the memes appeared. About how programmers don't need to learn or work, how Stack Overflow practically writes their code for them and all they do is search and copy…

And then the jokes stopped. The large language models arrived and turned out to be surprisingly good at solving a large share of the problems. And even bigger questions appeared.

Programmers of the World

In the meantime, Stack Overflow had turned from a community and a venture driven by volunteer labor into a commercial product. Despite persistent rumors, it was not bought by Microsoft; in June 2021 it became part of Prosus, a Dutch company and subsidiary of the South African media conglomerate Naspers, in a $1.8 billion deal.

After many years at the helm, Joel Spolsky left the company, and the post of CEO went to Prashanth Chandrasekar.

In 2022, Stack Overflow had about 20 million registered users and over 50 million visitors a month, practically every working programmer on the planet. Some 24 million questions had been asked on it, receiving 35 million answers. And then… ChatGPT appeared.

Sunset and Dawn

Over the last two years, traffic to the legendary site has fallen by about 50 percent. There are significantly fewer questions and answers, and all of this is, of course, easy to explain: today most programmers use various artificial intelligence systems and return to the good old “Mecca” only when those don't do the job.

This is gradually changing the rankings on Google, too: today results from Stack Overflow, once the search engine's undisputed favorites, get lost among the rest. The change is also visible in the discussions under the answers, where more and more users write that, at last, the hate, the needless rudeness, the drifting off into side topics and the impossibility of moderation have arrived here as well, just as on social networks.

At the end of last year, 10 percent of the 700 employees who look after the site were laid off. Of course, all this comes against the backdrop of layoffs at many other companies in the industry.

Nothing new in human history, is it? A venture captures the spirit of the times, becomes the fashion of the day, the standard, and then reaches its natural sunset. Here, however, the natural course of things may come with an unexpected price.

The Snake Eats Its Own Tail

Stack Overflow has always been an open, freely accessible site, even if it gradually developed its commercial side. But then it is only logical to wonder… how did large language models suddenly become so capable of writing computer code, improving it, finding bugs… answering complex or highly specific questions about building software?

“Some of the big companies explicitly cite Stack Overflow as a major source of training data,” says the project's current head, Prashanth Chandrasekar. He remembers the days when he was a young programmer, writing and debugging code late into the night. Because he would hit a dead end and there was no one to help him. “That's the reason Stack Overflow became so popular. You don't have to spend long hours at night to figure something out. You have this phenomenal community resource, and that can only be appreciated by people who have faced the problem.”

Now, however, Prashanth says, we are entering a new era, because we have the next generation of algorithms. Stack Overflow is also betting on bringing AI into the platform, like most of today's software giants.

Truth or Dare?

And so we come to the big question. What will we do from here, as the next new technologies arrive? Then there will be no one sitting and writing the answers, so what will artificial intelligence be trained on?

Yes, the companies developing large language models are willing to pay, and ever larger sums, for access to training data, but what if… there is no one and no way to provide it? Or will the algorithms move to the next level and no longer need it, having developed something ever closer to human thinking?

“All AI models need a constant stream of quality human data to train on. Without it, they are doomed to worse results,” says Chandrasekar. “This is a very real problem; we will always need solid, high-quality sources of truth like Stack Overflow.”

In other words… in programming, AI is quietly replacing human collaboration. And even here, the problem of defining, seeking and validating the truth emerges.

As Boris Simandov said not long ago, we are building ever more complex software solutions, but the whole process by which we do it is wrong. We keep piling up technical debt… and what happens next we can only guess.

The most important thing, in my view, is to keep asking the questions. Preferably before the answers overtake them…

• At the end of 2023, the largest group of Stack Overflow users were aged 25–34 (37.28 percent), followed by those aged 35–44 (23.02 percent). Last came those 65 and over (1.32 percent).
• The most used language today is JavaScript (63.61 percent), followed by HTML/CSS (52.97 percent) and Python (49.28 percent).
• According to the site's latest survey, for the first time the best-paid programmers are those using the new language Zig (earning an average of $103,611 a year). For several years in a row, Clojure held the top spot.
• Most users come from the US (21.21 percent), Germany (8.34 percent) and India (6.4 percent).
• The average time spent on the site is quite high by online standards: 7:21 minutes.

This piece was prepared with the special assistance of Irina Marudina.

Updated on July 30, 2024

If there is Gandalf and Gandalf the White, why not Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg the White?

Telegram founder Pavel Durov is a strange bird. Like his colleague, the “father” of Facebook, he was born in 1984. He got rich after creating a social network. He, too, managed to pile up a certain number of billions.

Only with some rather significant nuances. Unlike his peer, he speaks fluent Latin, and the photos make it clear that his musculature looks quite different. He made his global breakthrough with an app that guarantees you security and tries not to manipulate you. Not exactly the case with his colleague…

He graduated with every honor imaginable… in philology, even though at the same time he is supposedly a dangerous hacker. He became a celebrity before getting into serious trouble with the authorities in his homeland.

And all the while, to this day, he remains an enigma to the media around the world. Does he have two children, five children, or has he never had a relationship with a woman? And how did it suddenly turn out that he has… 100 children, whom he will try to introduce to one another? What will his next big project be? How does he imagine the future, and is he afraid of artificial intelligence?

“I don’t have land, I don’t have real estate. Nothing. Because for me, the number one priority in life is my freedom.”

Pavel Durov is one of those figures who make today’s tech world far more exciting…

I Came, I Saw, I Conquered

The richest citizen of the United Arab Emirates… we would surely picture a sheikh who has amassed oil-soaked wads of dollars and lately hands them out to aging football stars. But no, it is the young man you see in the photos.

The same one who, having amassed unexpected riches, amused himself with his colleagues by launching folded banknotes like paper airplanes from a St. Petersburg high-rise.

The same one who refused to hand over his users’ data and, for that reason, had to look for a new professional challenge (and a new citizenship).

The creator of two of the most successful online projects in history, a philologist with a gold-medal diploma… which, however, he never went to collect.

To Err Is Human

I must point out that far too little is known about him, so much so that until recently you wouldn’t find fresh posts from him on the big social networks, and we had to wait a long time for his first interview… Before that, he would pop up now and then only on Instagram, with macho photos garnished with life maxims—his own or Marcus Aurelius’s.

Pavel was born in St. Petersburg and started school in Turin, where he studied briefly before returning to his hometown. I call him a “young man” for personal reasons. Both he and Zuckerberg turn 40 this year, and I am on that list too.

Of course, of the three of us, he is the most youthful-looking; wicked tongues say aesthetic surgery has played no small part. Or perhaps, besides being a vegetarian and a libertarian, he simply gets up early and will live to 200?

While I Breathe, I Hope

He was hooked on computers by the age of 11. But he wasn’t the star of the family. His big brother Nikolai, four years older, could read like an adult at just 3 and solve quadratic equations at 8. He went on to win countless olympiads in programming and mathematics and set off down the path of the exact sciences.

Do you still think people are divided into humanities types and science types?

Their father, Valery, is (to this day) a professor, a specialist in Latin and the history of ancient Rome, and our hero followed in his footsteps.

In high school he was placed in an experimental class where every subject was studied in greater depth—including no fewer than four languages, Latin among them. Despite the high bar, Pavel stood out in every subject. He won school competitions in computer science, linguistics and design, and collected a string of scholarships.

If You Want Peace, Prepare for War

He sat at the front desk because of poor eyesight… but don’t picture the “classic nerd.” Around the same time, he managed to remotely change the wallpaper on every school computer to a photo of the computer science teacher captioned “Must die.” His classmates also recall that he was cut off from the school network several times, but he always found a way around the restrictions thanks to his experience with computers.

How exactly the two images combine—the overachieving student and the cyber hooligan… we can only guess.

He then studied English philology (with a focus on Latin) and, as I mentioned, in 2006 earned a diploma with highest honors from St. Petersburg State University, which he has yet to collect.

Life Is Short, Art Is Long

Because by then he already had an idea in his head that seemed to hold enormous possibilities. “When I looked at the people commuting to their offices every day for routine work, I didn’t imagine my life looking like that,” Durov says. “Running internet projects and organizing university events got me used to independence and to the idea of having no direct bosses.”

One of those projects was the university’s online forum, where the future entrepreneur was quite active on all kinds of topics—he later said he often logged in under different nicknames and argued with himself to provoke discussion. Well, apparently that is when he used up his desire to talk about himself. But he did become convinced that online communication could be far more appealing if people spoke under their real names.

Friends told him about a young man at Harvard who had created a network where his fellow students chatted, swapped photos and discussed important topics. Pavel sensed that something similar would be a huge success in Russia and… in a matter of days he built his first successful site, which to this day ranks among the 20 most visited in the world—VKontakte. Yes, today it has nothing to do with its creator, but it proved to be the ideal local solution at exactly the right moment.

At first the platform was to be called Student.ru, but he soon came up with the current name, because “sooner or later we all graduate.” His first collaborator was his brother Nikolai, with whom he built the platform. The first 2,000 users were gathered in just a week with the promise of a prize—an iPad for whoever brought in the most friends.

When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do

The young man quickly turned out to be astonishingly rich. Two of the rare scandals linked to his name date from this period. The notorious story in which Pavel and his colleagues, feeling on top of the world, threw $2,000 in 5,000-ruble banknotes folded into paper airplanes, while a crowd below fought to collect them. Durov later said it had been his unconventional way of marking St. Petersburg’s city day. In the other case, the entrepreneur allegedly bumped a police patrol car with his own… but the sources contradict each other so much about what actually happened that it isn’t even clear whether he was in the area.

Durov sold his last 12 percent of VKontakte’s shares in 2014, because “what you own sooner or later starts to own you.” I think I mentioned he has a soft spot for Marcus Aurelius.

Woe to the Vanquished

His big troubles began in 2014, when he refused to hand over the data of his Ukrainian users to the Russian authorities. Because of this he left his homeland and said he had no intention of returning. Today, by an irony of fate, the two software products he created are more sought after and used than ever in Russia too.

And speaking of the second one—Telegram appeared in August 2013 and gathered a million users in two months. Durov says the idea of a secure, encrypted messaging app came to him the first time special forces burst into his office demanding access to user data. Pavel realized that, at that point, he had no way of talking securely even with his own brother. It was time to build a platform. And it was his brother Nikolai who built it, developing the app’s cryptographic foundations.

The project was kept secret for a long time before it was ready to welcome users. And it experienced a real boom when people began talking more about online security—Telegram became the most downloaded app of 2021.

The Voice of the People Is the Voice of God

“We can’t make messaging technology secure for everybody except terrorists. It’s either secure or it’s not,” says the entrepreneur, who values protected online communication above all else. That is exactly why he chose Dubai as his home, saying he can work there without being harassed by the state.

For many years Durov funded the venture out of his own pocket—no revenue from ads or subscriptions—at a cost of $13 million a year.

Well, he can afford it; he is indulging himself. Today Pavel’s fortune is estimated at $11.5 billion—a far cry from his colleague Zuckerberg, he “barely” makes the global top 500, but he is the richest resident of the Arabian Peninsula and the youngest billionaire in that part of the world. He is also an official citizen of the island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and of France.

Among his newer plans was a blockchain platform with its own cryptocurrency—the gram. Its development attracted an impressive $1.7 billion in investment, but the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission refused to license the project, and it had to be abandoned. “The blockchain industry was built on the promise of decentralization, but it ended up concentrated in the hands of a few who began abusing their power,” Durov wrote on the subject.

The Truth Shall Make Us Free

In recent years, nothing has been heard of him taking on a new venture. As we might think from his Instagram profile, perhaps he has given himself over to rest and the pleasures of life. Or is he cooking up something truly big and different? I’d bet on the latter. According to people who know him, the online macho persona is a marketing trick to attract an audience.

“What we do now echoes in eternity”—one of the latest Marcus Aurelius quotes Durov has shared.

“As our civilization becomes more efficient at creating entertainment, at some point it may become too entertaining to still be efficient,” reads one of his recent tweets.

And the one before it: “Some people fear that AI will enslave humanity. But in a sense, it already has—through content recommendation algorithms. How many hours a day do you spend on your devices?”

O Tempora! O Mores!

By all appearances, he is moved by exactly the kinds of topics that make me tell Digital Stories.

Here are a few more strokes to show you just how interesting a character we are dealing with. He says he is inspired by Che Guevara and Steve Jobs. In some interviews he admits to being a committed Zen Buddhist, in others a Pastafarian, a follower of the made-up church that pokes fun at today’s religions. His big hobby is collecting rare ancient coins. He also loves extreme sports—from surfing to freestyle skiing.

On one of his birthdays he said he had long ago given up 7 things that, in his view, have a negative effect on the mind: alcohol, meat, all pharmaceutical products, nicotine, coffee, tea, fast food, sugar and… television, along with all its equivalents. What else is left for him but to crunch vegetables and pose shirtless for Instagram?

Fortune Favors the Bold

As I mentioned, his marital status is unclear. According to his only semi-official biography, he is believed to have married his fellow student Daria while at university and to have had a boy and a girl with her, who should be teenagers by now. And although no one has ever seen them or is sure they exist, they regularly appear in rankings of future wealthy heirs.

His classmates say Daria was then editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, while the prematurely balding Durov was one of the university’s celebrities. One day she stopped him in the hallway and asked for an interview, because he was “such a genius, such a talented and admirable person.”

Also from that time come his famous words at his graduation ball, when asked about his future: “I want to be the totem of the internet!” Well, he managed it, albeit by a rather strange, winding road.

Manol of the Hundred Brothers

You may remember the character by that name from Time of Parting, Anton Donchev’s classic Bulgarian novel about the Ottoman era. Well, Durov is certainly not his father, but… the heading is no accident. Because just when nothing at all was known about Durov’s private life, remarkable news suddenly appeared.

First, the Russian press ran an interview with a woman named Irina Bolgar, who said she had three children with Durov. And that the time had come to tell the truth online, because the children felt bad that nobody knew about them:

But why on earth… are they redheads?

Irina didn’t go into detail about the story of her relationship with Durov. But two days later he himself once again drew all eyes in remarkable fashion, saying that he is in fact… the father of more than 100 children!

“I’ve just been told I have over 100 biological children. How is that possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone?” he wrote on Telegram. He then explained that, at a friend’s suggestion, he had become a sperm donor to help couples who couldn’t have children of their own. Of course, everything happens anonymously, but Durov later added that he would publish his full DNA data so that each of them could look for their brothers and sisters around the world.

The story began 15 years ago, when the friend in question—the head of an IVF clinic—told him there weren’t enough donors and encouraged him to donate as much as he could…

And what do you know—billionaires like Musk and Durov are the ones most visibly and actively looking after the reproduction of humanity?

A Conversation by Request

A little earlier, in April 2024, his first major interview became a big event. It did not, of course, take place in the traditional media, but with the hugely popular and lately much-disputed Tucker Carlson. Durov told his story in detail, broadly confirming everything that was known about him. But he also said quite a few other important things—for instance, that the U.S. government, like every other government, uses technology to spy on people. That “an open back door is a door, no matter who uses it.” That this is precisely the battle that brought him to Dubai—far enough from the powerful of both East and West.

Contrary to his image so far, Durov was quite detailed, sincere, clear… Much more a person of flesh and blood than in his Instagram persona. Or is this, too, just a fashion?!

“I’m an optimist. I believe the world develops in cycles. And if today it seems things are moving in one direction, that doesn’t mean tomorrow they will keep moving the same way.”

He recalls meeting Zuckerberg, to whom he described his ideas, after which Facebook “tried to copy everything. Not what we did, but what I told them. It was funny.” “That’s why I think I shouldn’t do business with Mark Zuckerberg.”

And more: “I don’t have land, I don’t have real estate. Nothing. Because for me, the number one priority in life is my freedom. Once you start buying these things, it ties you to a physical location. I have nothing against people who buy property, but personally, for me, it’s not the answer. I’d rather make decisions that will affect how people communicate than choose the color of the walls in a house that only I, my family and my friends will ever see…”

Freedom… pretty strong words for a tech billionaire. I don’t know about you, but I’d believe he means it. What could be coming next?

Almost 40 years on, the original Tetris has finally been beaten!

The triumph of a likable 13-year-old kid turned all eyes back to the good old classic contest from the days when computer games were a perfect feast for the senses.

What does this have to tell us against the backdrop of artificial intelligence? Why, all of a sudden, has the human turned out to be capable of unexpected skills in so many games of the mind? How was the game everyone knows born, and how did it become a legend? What are its fascinating sides and its dark secrets?

This is a long and instructive digital story that runs through remarkable people, through triumphs and tragedies, through cultures and twists…

The Young Ones of Today

“I’m going to die, I can’t feel my hands…” These are the words of Blue Scuti just before he realizes he has achieved what he dreamed of. Almost four decades later, he has beaten, one way or another, the game we have all played.

Perched in front of a retro cathode-ray-tube television, found after countless hassles, clicking the buttons of a retro controller for 42 minutes straight at more than 20 taps per second… Blue Scuti reminded us that there is no limit to what a human can do. That it matters more to choose what we compete with one another in, and what is worth delegating to the machines.

If you don’t believe me, ask the father of Tetris. Today he drives a Tesla, but he learned to turn a steering wheel in a Lada, and he says he still uses the same habits. Because this story begins in a lab of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where secret technologies for the KGB were also being developed.

Back in the U.S.S.R.

Alexey Pajitnov’s grandfather was a well-known actor of the Soviet era who appeared in the classic screen adaptation of The Twelve Chairs. His father was a philosopher who defended a dissertation titled “The Formation of the Communist and Philosophical Views of Karl Marx,” before being fired in the late 1980s for signing the famous “Letter of the 80,” which called for reforms in the USSR.

The USSR, however, is still one of the world’s globes when this story begins, and the game’s creator graduates in mathematics and turns to computer science. At the time he works at the computing center of the Academy of Sciences, doing pioneering work on using artificial intelligence for human speech recognition. Fifteen programmers work in a room with five terminals and have to take turns—Alexey often comes in after the others have already gone home.

He likes his job, but he never stops wondering: couldn’t computers be used for fun too? It occurs to him to try to recreate on screen a board game he had loved as a schoolboy. It is called pentomino, and the goal is to fit together wooden pieces of various shapes, each made of five squares.

And where there is pentomino, there is tetromino—the same thing, except that the pieces are virtual and made of four squares each. The name Tetris itself comes from the most lucrative move, when you use the long tetromino to “burn” a full four rows of squares.

Brick by Brick, a Block

The game is born in the summer of 1984, when its creator is 29. Its first version, written in Pascal, runs on the Soviet Elektronika-60 computers of the day, which don’t even have the graphical interface we know today—the shapes appear as falling letters.

Pleased with the result, Alexey shares it with friends and brings in other developers to make the game better. He “hires” his 16-year-old neighbor, Vadim Gerasimov, to create a version for IBM computers, since he doesn’t know the programming language used there very well. The young man adds different colors to the game for the first time, along with a scoreboard.

This is where the psychologist Vladimir Pokhilko comes in, with the idea that there should be exactly seven shapes—because that is how many a player can best remember. Later Pokhilko will also be the first scientist to use the game for psychological research, and his path will become closely intertwined with Pajitnov’s… right up to a horrifyingly tragic ending.

Tetromino

But how does a Soviet game conquer the “rotten” West at a time when the Iron Curtain still hangs down in full force? Pajitnov asks his boss at the lab, Viktor Brjabrin, who travels abroad often, to help him, and in return all revenue from sales would go to the institute.

The game starts spreading on floppy disks across the former Eastern Bloc, and its road to the West begins in Budapest. There the disk falls into the hands of Robert Stein, an international software dealer from London, who sees huge potential in it. He finds the lab’s phone number, sends a fax proposing a partnership and… after long negotiations, a deal is struck. The Soviet scientists’ lab gets 80 percent of the revenue under a 10-year contract.

All this happens in 1986, just as the thaw between the two superpowers can be felt. Stein chooses a heavy socialist aesthetic for the presentation, as the official cover shows. A soundtrack is added—the folk song “Korobeiniki.” Cyrillic, the hammer and sickle, the Kremlin… with these the Eastern “Tetris revolution” begins! All that’s missing is the salvo of the cruiser Aurora.

These are the years when computer games go through their first real boom. Before long Nintendo will release the first game console designed to be connected to a TV, and its flagship will be none other than Tetris.

All of this goes through complicated negotiations and legal battles… A series telling the whole saga came out recently, while the game’s real-life series goes on to this day.

Tête-à-Tête

In 1991, Pajitnov and Pokhilko emigrate to the United States. Our hero patiently waits for 1996, when the rights contract expires and he becomes their full owner. Together with Robert Stein he sets up an organization that still takes a percentage of the sales of all the countless versions of Tetris.

His friend Vladimir Pokhilko devotes many years to clinical experiments using the game; he is the very person who encouraged Alexey early on to keep developing it.

Across the ocean, in San Francisco, the two found a software company that works on 3D graphics projects. They create several successful computer games, built on the idea that games should serve as “entertainment for the human soul.” The psychologist takes the helm, they open an office in Moscow as well, and the venture takes off…

By the late 1990s their business has dried up, and Pokhilko is forced to tell some 70 people that they need to look for new jobs. He takes it hard and withdraws into himself. And probably a mental illness is triggered. He stabs his wife and 12-year-old son to death before cutting his own throat. He leaves behind a suicide note that remains unexplained to this day: “They ate me alive. Vladimir. Remember that I exist. The Devil.”

Blocks in Colorful Shirts

Tragedy strikes Pajitnov’s life too—his younger son, Dmitry, dies in a skiing accident, and his body is found months later.

But the programmer overcomes his depression, as he himself puts it, through work—creating new game after new game. For several years he is part of the team at Microsoft. He develops versions of Tetris with various additions, such as three dimensions. He says he sometimes regrets not being born later, so that he could create games with modern technologies like today’s artificial intelligence.

In his view, the great failing of today’s game makers is that they only want to entertain players, not to develop them. That they design games as if for people of low intellect who don’t like to challenge their gray matter.

True, none of his many ventures ever comes close to the success of the first, but then how many people can boast of having created a legend?

Tetris is the best-selling computer game in history according to a number of rankings. By 2011 alone the game had sold 202 million copies—around 70 million on physical media and 132 million downloads. There are no precise statistics today, but the figure is many times higher.

We Played It Well…

The game is thought to be addictive because of a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect: the human brain holds on to unfinished tasks and lets go of them only once they are no longer needed. And Tetris never actually ends. The “Tetris effect,” in turn, is a psychological phenomenon in which, even when not playing, the brain involuntarily pictures combinations from the game.

One of Pajitnov’s big ideas is to make a version that can be played in teams—that, too, will happen, after he has worked on it for a whole decade. It comes out in 2019, though it fails to draw much interest. The programmer often says he regrets that the global computer industry is weak at developing multiplayer games. So instead of enjoying the pleasure of connecting with like-minded people thousands of miles away, players are locked into communicating with the computer.

And yet… Tetris becomes a unifier, a pursuit that builds team spirit, a sport—and in a way quite unexpected for Pajitnov himself.

Next Friday, look out for the story of the record that showed there are no limits before the human. That technology simply creates new possibilities for us, which we have to learn to use. And all of it… thanks to a remarkable 13-year-old kid nicknamed Blue Scuti.

As a boy, Kevin Mitnick was curious, but puzzles and chess left him cold; he preferred a rather different kind of problem… Before he even came of age, he was convicted of hacking, a crime that at the time didn't even exist in the law books.

Soon he would become the most wanted hacker, “Public Enemy No. 1” (according to the New York Times) and the FBI's greatest challenge. Only to land in prison again, and to walk out as the savior of companies from online criminals.

A life like a movie, you'll say. And films have indeed been made about his life, but… only about part of it. In July 2023, Kevin Mitnick passed away, seemingly having finally found happiness, though he narrowly missed living to see his first child.

The man who coined the term “social engineering,” the teacher of today's hackers and of today's cybersecurity specialists alike, lived his life like a movie worth watching from beginning to end. The way he himself would have told it—the most wanted and most talked-about hacker in history…

Home Alone

Kevin's parents divorced when he was very young. To support him, his mother worked almost around the clock. And from an early age he cared less about playing with friends than about discovering new things.

He loved to travel, but in the 1970s that was anything but cheap for a family like his. So at just 12, Kevin “hacked” the system for the first time. Back then, the Los Angeles bus network used a fare system much like the punched paper tickets Bulgarians knew until only yesterday—except that there the “secret” lay not in the ticket itself but in how the holes were “arranged” on it. With careful planning, the boy managed to find a whole pad of blank transfer slips, then persuaded one of the drivers to show him how the punching system worked, claiming it was for a school project…

The result: Kevin soon had slips for every bus line and began roaming the city at will. For the first time he had pulled off an “attack” we hear more and more about today—social engineering.

The Hacker-in-Chief

“Before long I had memorized the schedules of every bus in the system,” Kevin recalled. “It was an early example of my surprising memory for certain kinds of information; to this day I remember phone numbers, passwords and other things from my childhood.”

Another thing that drew him from an early age, and that would soon emerge in full force, was magic. “Once I learned how a new trick worked, I practiced, practiced and practiced until I had mastered it. To some extent, it was through magic that I discovered the pleasure of fooling people.”

In high school he got hooked on “phone phreaking”—breaking into the telephone system. Back then all communication ran over the familiar analog lines, and this is where we find the prototypes of today's hacking. With various tricks, the kids got themselves free calls they couldn't otherwise afford. The time came for the “magic” to be put into practice—Kevin quickly learned to pass himself off as someone else and get exactly what he was after.

A Gang with a Traitor

He became a virtuoso—creating unlisted phone numbers, calling from other people's numbers, listening in on and cutting off conversations. He grew used to handling complex technical questions; as he himself put it, at the height of this part of his “career,” kid though he was, he knew the phones and the network better than any technician.

Then came the age of computers. The first network he hacked was his own school's. And although he could have bumped up his grades, he didn't. What interested him was the approach to reaching the goal, the process, not the benefits he might reap. Something he would keep explaining for the rest of his life…

In 1980, at 16, Kevin made his first serious break-in, gaining access to the computers on a large company's network. He was part of a group of hackers at the time; they were given away after a typical teenage love drama, and he received his first sentence—three months in a juvenile detention center.

When the Internet Was Young

Then the wheel turned, and although the hacker kept getting better at his craft, the weak link almost always turned out to be someone else. In 1987 he was betrayed by his friend Lenny DiCicco—the two had carried out a string of hacking attacks together. When the FBI came, Kevin asked Lenny, with genuine curiosity, why he had turned him in. “You're a danger to society,” replied his friend of yesterday.

This time Kevin had a skilled lawyer, who argued that his client suffered from a severe addiction to computers, and that the addiction was to blame for the crimes. As a result, the sentence was just a year under lenient conditions.

After he got out, the most active period of our hero's life began. Within days, for some mysterious reason, the phone number of the officer assigned to monitor him was blocked, the judge who had sentenced him woke up locked out of his bank account, and all the data on his case vanished from the court's mainframe.

Bonnie and Kev

Several times Kevin landed jobs as a programmer, but his fame quickly caught up with him. His record stint was at the 20th Century Fox studio—a full two months.

After yet another short spell in the cooler, he decided to try to finish his studies at a new college, where he met the beautiful Bonnie. She impressed him so much that… he hacked her ex-boyfriend's phone to prove to her that the man was cheating on her.

The romance took off; they even started working at the same company… when the police once again sensed he was up to something and seized the hard drives from his home. Guessing what the officers would find, Kevin and Bonnie hastily got married, which legally freed her from any duty to testify against her husband. The marriage lasted… right up until the next time the hacker ended up behind bars.

Mitnick the Beatnik

Where is the line between legend and truth? We'll hardly ever know. Either way, in the early 1990s Kevin became a legend, and he would stay on his pedestal as the most skilled hacker in all of computer history.

He denied a huge share of the episodes he was accused and convicted of. Several times he said he had quit hacking for good, but something always happened to knock him off balance. In the 1980s it was his breakup with Bonnie, and in 1992 his brother died. Kevin had supposedly given up hacking by then and was doing paid consulting, but the news devastated him; he briefly lost 45 kilograms and then… disappeared.

After a series of hacking attacks, he was placed on the federal wanted list. He stayed in hiding for three whole years, living under a false identity. And “working” hard, diving into the technology of mobile phones.

On Christmas Day 1994, however, he made a fatal mistake. He broke into the personal computer of cybersecurity specialist Tsutomu Shimomura, just to mock one of his leading rivals. He even left him an audio file full of insults. But someone else laughed last: Shimomura joined the FBI team on Mitnick's trail, and on February 15, 1995, the hacker was arrested.

“Despite the myth of Kevin Mitnick created by the media, I am not a malicious hacker,” Kevin later wrote. “What I did wasn't even against the law when I started, but it became a crime after new legislation was passed. I kept going anyway and got caught. But the federal government's treatment of me was based not on the crimes, but on making an example of me. I did not deserve to be treated like a terrorist.”

Hacker Won't Peck Out Hacker's Eye

This is where his mythical status was born. During the trial the authorities did everything they could to demonize him. Shimomura, together with John Markoff, wrote the book Takedown, which became a bestseller and the script for a box-office film. Markoff, in turn, was a journalist who had also joined the manhunt and described it on the front page of The New York Times in grandiose terms. The US Department of Justice itself called Mitnick “the most wanted computer criminal in United States history.”

Meanwhile, a mass campaign for his release got underway. Kevin's “colleagues” hacked some of the biggest websites, plastering them with slogans that he had been framed, that he was a scapegoat.

The trial dragged on, and when it finally came to a verdict, the sentence was five years—but the hacker had already served four of them. Which is downright symbolic: had the original charges been upheld, they would have cost him… 300 years behind bars.

Hold My Hat

Kevin walked out of prison as a pop star and made the most of the new role. For three more years he was barred from using electronic devices, so even when he appeared as… a CIA agent in the modest series Alias, he had to use a fake computer prop.

Then the probation period ran out, and Kevin went back to hacking, but from the other side. In his “trade,” “black hats” are the ill-wishers who attack systems in order to abuse them, and “white hats” are those who test security to help companies. Well, with the arrival of the new century Kevin changed his hat (as far as anyone knows) for good. In the last years of his life he founded his own cybersecurity consulting company, became a leading expert on the subject and a popular speaker. In the end he found love again in fashion designer Kimberley, who soon took the surname Mitnick.

By then he was even helping the police. In a small town in Michigan, a phone terrorist surfaced and began a series of bomb threats. The sheriff contacted Mitnick, who explained in detail what data to request from the phone company, and the 15-year-old prankster was soon caught. “Don't thank only me, thank Tsutomu Shimomura too,” Mitnick smiled. With a large dose of irony, because Mitnick accused the journalist Markoff of using entirely made-up facts and creating a wildly exaggerated image that he never managed to escape. And Shimomura, completely undeservedly, got cast as the shining hero.

Final Customs

For nearly a year Kevin fought pancreatic cancer before passing away in July 2023, at 59, just short of the birth of his first child. Leaving behind him the legendary image of the mythical hacker.

Does he deserve it? Undoubtedly. If only because throughout his life he never got rich and never cashed in on the huge breaches he had pulled off. Of course, they were by no means harmless: the damage from the crimes he was convicted of alone exceeds $300 million, and many believe his overall “contribution” is many times larger. Motorola, IBM, Nokia and Sun Microsystems are just some of the companies he managed to “crack.” The list is rounded out by NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And yet… there was a great deal of art in his “work.” He could step into all kinds of roles to gain access to his next target. He became an employee who had forgotten his password, a technician in need of assistance. He even got the better of the FBI's phone network, monitoring communications between the agents hunting him. For him, hacking was always a challenge, an adventure—on both sides of the hat.

“Some people get out of bed every morning dreading their daily work routine, as if they toiled in salt mines,” Kevin wrote. “I've been lucky enough to enjoy my work. You can't imagine the challenge, the reward and the pleasure I felt. I honed my talent in the art called ‘social engineering’: getting people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do for a stranger—and pay me for it. It wasn't hard for me to perfect it, because my father's side of the family has been in sales for generations, and the art of influence and persuasion may be an inherited trait. When you combine an inclination for deceiving people with the talents of influence and persuasion, you get the profile of a social engineer.”

Hack to Basics

“Anyone who loves playing chess knows that it's enough to defeat your opponent. You don't have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile,” he said. What would he advise young people interested in hacking? “Don't follow in my footsteps. Get good at using virtual machines and all the available tools. Dig deep into system administration and the fundamentals before jumping into security.”

“As long as computer code exists, there will be vulnerabilities,” the mythical hacker reassures us in one of his many books.

“What I became convinced of is that it will always be easier to manipulate people than technology,” he said. “Companies spend millions of dollars on protections, encryption and devices, but that money is wasted. None of these measures addresses the weakest link in the security chain—people. Besides, any technology is vulnerable to attack if you have enough time and resources.”

The Trickster

His role in recent years almost feels a bit dull: the wise, battle-scarred figure who looks after… security. Considering that he himself invented and popularized the most common types of attacks in use today.

As he put it himself, “my job now is like Pablo Escobar retraining as a pharmacist.” Rather colorful, wouldn't you say?

Just like his explanations that he did something that wasn't even forbidden back then and undeservedly became the black sheep. In the end, he simply never managed to escape his love of magic. Something there is less and less of in our lives, and in the computer world…

Two kids become friends over their shared fascination with computers. Then they start their first company together. Less than a decade later, that same company is the first giant of the modern computer age. And while we know a great deal about one of those kids, who for a long time was the richest man on the planet, the story of the other is far less familiar.

None other than the computer specialist Paul Allen, the “godfather” of Microsoft, turned out to be the owner of the most expensive private art collection ever sold. And this happened in November 2022, four years after he left this world. A connoisseur of art, a man smitten with sports, a huge donor to scientific research. He is also the rich man who awakened the modern interest in spaceflight.

At just 29 he learned that he had a deadly illness, and he decided to live the rest of his life the way he had always dreamed.

There is a lot we can learn from the story and the worldview of this unconventional figure. And, even more, we can ask ourselves: what would today’s tech world look like if its other leaders shared his outlook?

Great Expectations

No, no, just picture it. Bill Gates was paid at school to write a program that would schedule the classes. And he wrote it so that in English class he was the only boy, alongside a dozen of the prettiest girls in school. Bill the playboy, good luck…

While he was at Harvard, he spent many nights at the poker club, sometimes losing hundreds of dollars a night. Perhaps that was when he learned to bluff, which later came in handy at work…

These are the kinds of deliciously curious stories Paul Allen tells in his memoir, Idea Man. And there really is no way to separate his fate from that of his childhood friend. Together they sketch the story of two very different personalities, both of them emblematic of Silicon Valley.

Paul is Bill’s senior by a whole two years.

His mother was a literature teacher, his father a librarian. He kept an exceptionally close and special bond with both of them all his life, and yet… the boy was thrilled by computers rather than books. That is how, at Lakeside School in Seattle, he met the younger kid whose name you know so well.

Especially gifted at writing code, Paul Allen considered himself an artist all his life.

To the Top

In the late 1960s the two often ended up in the school’s computer lab—back then it was anything but easy to get your hands on the grandfathers of today’s computers. The machines there turned out to be rather feeble, so the kids set their sights on the University of Washington. But there too, as if it were a space telescope, you only got limited access.

Bill and Paul, however, were hackers, and they tried to cheat the system… but they weren’t good enough. They were caught and punished with a ban on using the computers.

So the two of them joined Bill’s best childhood friend, Kent Evans, in a computer club. It would be decades before a profession devoted to this work appeared—QA—but the three kids were given the task of hunting for bugs in the programs of the local computer center, and in return they were granted extra hours to tinker on the machines.

Sadly, at only 17, Kent died in a mountain climbing accident. That brought Bill and Paul even closer, and they carried on together.

Pride and Prejudice

Paul was admitted to Washington State University with a perfect score. But he found it dull and dropped out after his second year to become a programmer—at a time when that was a rather exotic profession, in the strange era of dinosaur computers.

As luck would have it, his first job was at Honeywell, whose offices were near Harvard, the very university young Bill had just entered.

It was Paul who persuaded him to drop out as well, so that together they could start something entirely different. And it was Paul, again, who suggested naming the venture Microsoft—combining microcomputers and software.

We still have much to learn about those times that laid the foundations of the modern computer world. What is certain is that the two young entrepreneurs were enormously lucky to land in the position that would very soon launch them, with a bang, to the top. There is, for instance, the well-known story of Gary Kildall, the computer pioneer who very nearly ended up in their place.

Vanity Fair

The fact remains, though, that Bill and Paul got the incredible chance to offer an operating system for IBM’s new computers, and they pulled it off in the best possible way. All sorts of legends circulate about those days—stolen code, intrigues and other episodes worthy of a soap opera. But many believe the big success came, once again, thanks to Paul and his idea of licensing the rights to the new operating system to their clients instead of selling them.

That is how the first workable MS-DOS ended up on countless computers all over the Earth at exactly the moment they became widely affordable. And from there the road to Windows, the operating system that paved the highway of today’s technology, was quite logical and natural.

Of course, there are equally good arguments that the decisive role belonged to Bill, thanks to his capacity for work and his ruthlessness. He had clearly taken enough useful lessons from poker and knew what he was doing. He worked with endless persistence and expected the same from everyone else.

Another story, also told by Paul, has become legendary: his partner ran into one of the lead programmers, who had worked 81 hours over the previous four days, rushing to finish an important task. And instead of thanking him and congratulating him, or at least asking how he felt, Bill asked: “What are you working on tomorrow?”

Beggarman, Thief

Yes, Paul later wrote that working with Bill was sometimes like being in hell, and that he had a very domineering nature. Yet after Paul’s death, Gates admitted that “Microsoft would have never happened without Paul.”

Somewhere around then the two friends’ paths parted. It was 1982, seven years after the company was founded. Barely 29, Paul Allen heard the terrifying diagnosis: non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He had to start treatment quickly. He had also sensed that he no longer felt at home in a company that had turned into an empire. And yet, one way or another, he remained part of it—until 2009 he held a formal post from which he shared his experience.

While undergoing treatment, he had plenty of time to think about what really matters in life. And so came the conversation with his childhood friend in which the time arrived to part ways. The two had agreed earlier that Bill would hold the larger share of the stock, but now Bill offered to buy all of Paul’s shares at $5 apiece. Paul said a fair price would be nearly double. They parted on bad terms, even though at that moment Paul’s future was uncertain as he faced the fearsome disease. With the help of his new partner, Bill managed to push his childhood friend into the background.

But what matters is that Paul proved stronger than the illness. Radiation and chemotherapy worked, and the lymphoma was beaten. The cancer would return decades later, but he used every moment of those years to spend them the way he had dreamed. Because once you have looked death in the eye, you know that what matters is not money but the days you leave behind.

Be a Bulgarian, Jeeves

The shares Bill Gates had begrudged buying kept piling up value, year after year. Thanks to them, in 2006 Paul Allen was the sixth-richest person in the world, with a fortune of $20 billion.

But Bill is hardly that upset. In recent years he has stubbornly tried to step into the role of philanthropist, a fighter against epidemics, which has earned him mostly… the lead role in conspiracy theories about how he will control us through chips in vaccines.

Meanwhile, the halo of the philanthropist stayed with Paul, even if it didn’t draw nearly as many eyes.

What if they had swapped roles? Would kindhearted Paul have been so brutal with the competition, so tireless, while the foundations of the Microsoft empire were being poured in the 1990s?

We can only guess and, above all, trust fate, which knows its business. Because here is what Paul Allen achieved in those 36 years that fate “gifted” him.

Wuthering Heights

He died of that same non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2018, at 65, despite the doctors’ more optimistic outlook this time. He had heard the grim diagnosis for the second time in 2009.

And then, in November 2022, his name was back at the top of the news. $1,622,249,500—that was the sum fetched by 155 works of art from Paul’s collection. The auction broke many records: the collection became the most expensive in history, and five paintings went for over $100 million—two by Georges Seurat and one each by Gauguin, Cézanne and Van Gogh. Every single work sold, two-thirds of them above their estimates.

All the money will go to charity, just as the late billionaire’s will stipulates.

The only serious relationship of his life came in his early twenties; he even got engaged. But the girl decided she was too young to marry, they split, and from then on, many say, he lived the life of a recluse.

Though he was a great lover of art and enjoyed stories about love, he never found it himself, and he left this world alone, without a family of his own.

The Sign of Four

It is very rare for someone to know what to do with a vast amount of money and to actually have it at the same time. Well, our hero is one of the few examples. Brace yourselves—the list is long.

Allen amassed serious wealth through various entrepreneurial ventures with the help of Vulcan, the company created to manage his fortune. Thanks to farsighted investments in real estate, internet access networks and a range of technologies, the estate keeps swelling even today, after his death. There was also a strong emphasis on invention—Allen’s companies hold more than 400 patents in all sorts of technological fields.

It is worth mentioning that both in his lifetime and today, the person closest to him, his sister Jody Allen, has played a large role in all his undertakings. After his death she became the trustee of his estate, most of which is earmarked for charity.

It is believed, for example, that her love of cinema is why the producing of Hollywood films made it onto the company’s enormous list of activities. Among the films they made are some that won Grammy and Emmy awards.

Paradise Lost

And yes, if you imagine that a tech person must be far removed from art, here is one stereotype that can go to the movies and watch the films Paul created. Or to an exhibition—we have already talked about his collection.

Paul also loved music. He got his first guitar at just 16 and dreamed of being the next Jimi Hendrix. Well, for better or worse, things didn’t quite turn out that way. Still, he fulfilled that dream too, at least to the extent of one album.

Sports were another big chapter of his life. Paul was a yachtsman himself; his last boat, 126 meters long, was called Octopus and until recently ranked among the 20 longest motor yachts in the world—with two helicopters and its own mini-submarine. Every year, during the Cannes festival, he threw famous parties aboard, where he played guitar.

In 1988 he bought the NBA team the Portland Trail Blazers, which reached the league finals twice under his ownership. For a time he also owned an American football team, the Seattle Seahawks, and a soccer team in the American league, the Seattle Sounders.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Space was another great love of the entrepreneur. He was the sole investor in SpaceShipOne, the first commercial project to send a human into suborbital space. It was not only a huge success but, in its own way, it led the charge before the next big Silicon Valley investors in the field arrived, people like Musk and Bezos.

In his lifetime Allen gave more than $2.6 billion to various forms of charity related to science, technology, biodiversity conservation and medicine.

He founded a number of his own research institutions. The Institute for Brain Science came about after his mother showed the first symptoms of dementia. Facing the problem firsthand gave him the push to fund research in that direction. That is also where his largest single donation went: half a billion dollars.

$2 million went to a new library at the University of Washington. It bears the name of his father, Kenneth Allen, who had once headed that very library.

He funded a team that found an aircraft carrier lost in World War II. $7 million went to protecting elephants. Because of his donations to nature research, a species of fly bears his name.

Allen donated to the SETI program, which aims to search for extraterrestrial life. With $100 million, he was also the biggest benefactor in the fight against the Ebola virus in West Africa.

As You Like It

His vision also shows in the creation of an institute dedicated specifically to artificial intelligence research, long before the field gained its current fame.

“No one really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality,” he said on the subject. “Still, I can imagine a day when perhaps, if we manage to understand how the human brain works, it might be possible. But that is a long, long road…”

One more thing. Once enough years had passed, Paul forgave his childhood friend Bill for their bitter split. As early as the late 1980s the two jointly donated $2.2 million to the school where they had met. And so, somehow fittingly, the circle closed.

“As long as we work together—both quickly and decisively—there are no limits to what we can achieve,” said Paul Allen.

What might have turned out differently in this story, and how, is an intriguing question whose answer we can never know. But still: what will history say? Who is the greater visionary—Bill, who built the most powerful company of his time, or Paul, who devoted himself to living the way he believed in? I leave the answer to you…

“The creature peers with many eyes into the open world…” Who might this creature be?

The upheaval at OpenAI over the past week has outdone Game of Thrones for plot twists—and even Bulgarian politics. Sam Altman, the leader of the company that has become a dominant force, was suddenly… fired. In his place stood the company's chief technology officer, Mira Murati. Then came utter chaos, at the end of which everything fell right back into place.

We have yet to learn (or perhaps we never will) how and why this circus happened.

More than curious is the version, reported even by serious media outlets, that the cause of it all is Q*—“Q star,” a new algorithm capable of shaking humanity to its core. Altman presented it to the board of directors, and they were so frightened that they decided to save the world…

And while the online debates turned into telenovela-style squabbles over who pulls the strings and how, who ended up in the stronger position and what changes in the tech world after all the commotion… only the image of the woman who, for a few days, found herself at the head of the company was left on the sidelines.

Although her name came up after the huge success of ChatGPT, the Albanian Mira Murati always remained in Altman's shadow. Now the time has come to learn more about her, because, by all appearances, the future of the world will depend on her actions—and not only the world of technology…

The Albanian Heating Coil

Yes, forgive the cliché—“Albanian heating coil” is a worn-out Bulgarian catchphrase, and there was no way I could resist opening with it.

When the company's board declared of Altman that it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” all sorts of interpretations began. According to one of them, the atmosphere at the AI giant resembles that of today's China—the business people clash with the technology people, who believe the former don't understand the subject well enough. That they are forced to make decisions beyond their abilities, because those decisions are too important. Could this also be connected to the news that the company's main goal had officially been declared as “creating general AI”?

There is logic in that, too—no one could fault Altman on business metrics. He turned a little-known firm, supposedly created to make artificial intelligence accessible to everyone, into a vast empire into which Microsoft alone has poured more than $13 billion.

At first it seemed there was also a “gray cardinal,” the company's “brain,” Ilya Sutskever. Undeniably a fascinating figure, and yet it was decided that not he but Murati would stand at the head of OpenAI—she had worked close to Altman and had never distanced herself from him. What's more, a day after the scandal broke, Sutskever apologized for Altman's dismissal, and after Altman's return it quietly turned out that Sutskever was no longer on the board.

The chaos was total also because the decision thus came to rest on the shoulders of the other three board members, whose names are considerably less familiar. Adam D'Angelo is an entrepreneur best known as the creator of the Quora platform and a former vice president of Facebook; Tasha McCauley is known mostly for her work in robotics; and Helen Toner is… known for nothing at all—she heads a research center on security in technology.

Enver Hoxha

Throughout the whole scandal, our heroine “logged on” only once. At the height of it, she wrote that “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” And at the end, with a heart emoji, she shared the tweet about Sam Altman’s return.

Everything Wikipedia has on her comes to… 14 lines. When I asked ChatGPT itself to draw me Mira Murati seizing power, it apologized and said it couldn’t, since it can only create images of public figures.

But how is it possible that the chief technology officer of a company that has drawn so many eyes has still never ended up in the spotlight?

It is only fair, of course, to mention that until recently the same was true of Altman himself. The great furor over ChatGPT quickly changed that, but not where Murati is concerned, despite her exceptionally important role. In companies like this, the position of chief technology officer carries enormous responsibility for all of the company’s products. For all the big questions tied to the progress of artificial intelligence.

Give Mira a Chance

“Artificial intelligence can be misused, or used by bad actors. So then there are big questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally, in a way that is consistent with human values.” Those are Mira Murati’s words to Time magazine—one of the few interviews she has ever given, which you could count on the fingers of one hand.

“It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people, and we need a ton more input into this system, a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” she adds.

I would definitely invite her to help promote Digital Stories—after all, that is exactly why this site exists: to gather so many different points of view on technology, a subject vital to our civilization.

But isn’t the big question about the next generation peeking through here somewhere—about the thing that is apparently emerging under the name Q*, as cryptic as that of one of Musk’s children? Perhaps it is no coincidence that the news on the subject also mentions that the big dispute over the new algorithm began with a memo sent by none other than Mira Murati to all OpenAI employees.

Let There Be Mira

Her past is so secretive that, according to some sources, she was born and raised in Tirana, studied computer science there and later moved to the United States. According to others, only her parents are Albanian, while she was born and raised in San Francisco… According to Wikipedia, her birthplace is Vlorë in Albania, and the source cited is… the Indian edition of Forbes. Even her year of birth comes in different versions, putting her today anywhere between 34 and 38. Almost like Kim Jong Un…

Still, she was most likely born on December 16, 1988, which means she will soon turn 35.

After a good deal of digging, I came across a podcast in which she talks about her past—that she is the daughter of a literature teacher. “When I was a kid, Albania was extremely isolated, like North Korea is today. There wasn’t much choice of entertainment, nothing but books. Books were the whole universe… I just looked for everything in books.”

Even the official OpenAI website not only has no biography of her—her name appears only in the long lists of employees who built this or that platform.

Or could it be that she herself… is an algorithm?

Take Mira—or Take the Axe!

Not yet. In her own words, she left for Canada when she was 16. We know she finished high school in Vancouver and then studied both art and engineering at Dartmouth College. Though the smallest member of the Ivy League, the college is famous as the place where, more than half a century ago, the world's first computer scientists gathered and began talking about “artificial intelligence.”

Yet nothing in the biography of Miss Murati (there are at least enough sources to confirm she is not a Mrs.) suggests a professional pull toward algorithms in particular. Her first job was as an analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Then she was a product manager on Tesla's notorious Model X. For a while she was at the startup Leap Motion.

She left in 2016 and spent two years without a job… until she was hired as deputy head of the applied AI department at OpenAI. She climbed the hierarchy quickly, until we reach May 2022, when she took her current position as chief technology officer, directly responsible for developing the ChatGPT project.

A Three Days' Wonder

With, of course, the brief interlude between November 17 and 20 of this year, when she shot to the head of the entire company and then stepped back.

But… isn't chief technology officer usually a role for someone with serious technical experience, who knows the subject inside out and has worked professionally on development in the field? It looks somewhat odd against both the education and the track record of our heroine.

Of course, no one can deny her enormous contribution to turning ChatGPT into a super-sensation. But it is also especially telling how, once again, the flagship role in the tech world has gone to a company that is… strange, to put it mildly, where decisions are made hastily and impulsively, as in that astonishing last week.

Microsoft's leader Satya Nadella says of her that she has “demonstrated an ability to assemble teams with technical expertise, commercial acumen, and a deep appreciation for the importance of the mission.”

When Q* Was Young

Paranoid Android. “Please, could you stop the noise? I’m trying to get some rest from all the unborn chicken voices. Voices in my head,” sing the rockers from Radiohead, and the song of the same name, Mira says, describes her best. Paranoid Android, how does that sound to you? Or the lyrics, as confused as this and as the whole situation at OpenAI lately.

By the way, the song is dedicated to a “real” paranoid android, that lovable fellow Marvin from Douglas Adams's great The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is definitely not an image we would want artificial general intelligence to grow into…

Play the video

The Quiet White Danube Stirs

There aren't many other breaches in the wall guarding her personal information. We know that she speaks English, Italian and Albanian. Her hobbies are reading fiction, playing the piano, making chocolate desserts and dancing salsa. She also has a soft spot for mountain hiking. When does she find the time?!

Her favorite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Quite curious, if you remember that Stanley Kubrick's science fiction classic, based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, is about a future in which humanity faces its first encounter with an unknown civilization.

“The film continues to stir my imagination with its imagery and music, especially in the breathtaking sequence where the space shuttle lands to the accompaniment of Johann Strauss's waltz ‘The Blue Danube,’ inviting contemplation of the weightlessness of the event and the magnificence of the moment,” she explains. And I'm sure she wrote out her answers for that interview; it wasn't done live.

Her favorite book is rather unconventional—the Duino Elegies, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Lofty, classical poetry that is definitely not for everyone.

Reconciliation

“My curiosity started with mathematics,” Mira says. “When I was a child, I was solving problems all the time, competing in olympiads, and I loved it. It was such a passion.”

“One of the things people get wrong about communist regimes is that when everyone is equal, there is fierce competition for knowledge, and education is everything. That's the environment I grew up in. I have always been very hungry for knowledge and have always strived for it.”

In the beginning, after the ChatGPT boom, many people reproached its creators for releasing to the mass consumer a project that had not been studied thoroughly enough. For opening Pandora's box, for popularizing a technology that other big companies also had but had not dared to show the world.

And here we are, a whole year later. That decision has proved more than successful, and the apocalypse (at least for now, before Q*, whoever that may be) is still not here—though there is plenty of tongue-wagging about which professions will disappear. What does Mira think about all this?

“We didn't expect quite so much excitement when our child came into the world. In fact, we were even a little anxious about releasing it. I'm curious to see the areas where it will start generating benefits for people, and not just headlines and pure curiosity,” she tells Time once again.

Mira and Milko

Wait… “our child,” really?!

If the headline of this piece struck you as far-fetched, it turns out our heroine herself sees things this way. Here the defenders of traditional values will have something to say about the family status of Altman and Murati as potential parents—it won't be me.

“We chose the chatbot format because dialogue is a way to interact with the model and give it feedback,” Mira explains. “If we think its answer is wrong, we can say, ‘Are you sure? I think actually…’ And then it has the chance to carry on, much the way we would talk to another person.”

And a year later? It's no secret that the technology is advancing thanks to all those conversations. And OpenAI has something none of its competitors can afford—the accumulated data from the chatbot's “conversations” with billions of users. Data that, in the battle of the algorithms, is definitely worth its weight in gold nuggets.

The Mirages Are Near, the Road Is Long

Mira describes her work at Tesla as “a very formative experience—I went through the whole process, from designing a vehicle to deploying it.” But, she says, what interested her more was general intelligence. “I wasn't sure how far we would get, but I knew that even if we just got very close, the things we would build along the way would be incredible. Given that, OpenAI's mission to develop artificial intelligence tools for the benefit of humanity really appealed to me.”

And one more curious thing. While all of us rushed to wonder whether programmers or writers would be the first to lose their jobs because of “her child,” Mira, much like Bill Gates, believes the most important changes ahead are in education.

“We can see that it has the potential to revolutionize the way we learn. There are, say, 30 people in a classroom. Each one has a different background, a different way of learning, and they all get the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can talk to the model endlessly to understand a concept in a way that's tailored to your level of understanding. This has enormous potential to help us with personalized education.”

Q Superstar

But, as we said, the problem is keeping it out of the hands of “bad people.” And talking more about the real questions that technology raises.

“Our goal is to get to artificial general intelligence. And we want to get there in a way that ensures it goes well for humanity. That we are building something that is ultimately beneficial,” says the compatriot of Skanderbeg, Albania's national hero.

“With all its eyes the creature-world beholds the open,” writes Rainer Maria Rilke in Mira's favorite book, the one mentioned earlier. Might that creature turn out to be Q*?

In our confused world, more surely depends on today's heroine than on most of the world's political leaders. Will she cope? We're counting on that solid Eastern European education.

One thing is certain: we live in interesting times…

These days we keep less and less of our important information with us—our files, photos, documents, archives. The physical storage media are gone—floppies, discs, flash drives; the size of your hard drive no longer matters, everything important is in the cloud now. It's so convenient! No risk of losing anything, access from anywhere. The companies take care of security, and it's all so reassuring…

The companies?! Yes, today we rely on data in the cloud, using space that is almost always handed to us by one of the online giants. If we don't get carried away, it's even free, generous enough, fast, secure. But is that really down to how much they care about us?

Our data, as we've discussed before, is the most expensive resource in the online world today. And by handing it over to the cloud, we turn ourselves into even more conveniently and reliably manipulable units. What's more, at any moment whoever runs the cloud can change the rules, and suddenly we could lose our entire archive.

The Great Schemer

To be left without all our children's photos, to lose documents vital to our work… suddenly, in one fell swoop.

Kim Dotcom is not a website, nor is he the next heir to the North Korean dynasty or to the Kardashian clan. But yes, that is also the name of his website. And his life is a roller coaster—first a hacker, then a mega-successful entrepreneur. Then comes a period as a multimillionaire and another one… as a criminal doing everything in his power to escape American justice. And somewhere in between comes his role as a defender of freedom online.

It's time for one of today's most colorful and least-known digital stories, as unexpected and instructive, as vivid and dynamic as its protagonist.

John Doe Dot Com

I turned my name into a domain—karamanev.me. But I have to admit it's far, far more original to do the reverse, as our hero did, born with the rather dull name Kim Schmitz.

The author of an album that reached the top 8 in New Zealand, and of films. Founder of an internet party and father of six. A hacker and a bon vivant, an unrivaled whirlwind, a tech genius who has a great deal of important things to tell us.

Looking at the cheerful big family on his Instagram profile, hardly anyone would guess that today Kim is in the thick of a ten-year battle for justice against the American authorities, one in which he seems to be on the side of right. Nor would you have guessed it from the beginning of this story.

He was born in 1974 to a German father and a Finnish mother. At 16 he committed his first cybercrimes, and at 20 came his “debut” arrest—for selling stolen phone card numbers. Somehow naturally, as computers went mainstream, Kim moved on to that kind of fraud—and kept at it for a whole decade. In 2003 he was convicted in Germany of embezzling funds online and spent five months in prison before walking away with a 20-month suspended sentence.

When the Internet Was Young

He became famous in the '90s after boasting to the German media that he had hacked the websites of NASA, the Pentagon and Citibank. He went by the name Kimble—the hero of a 1960s TV series, later brought to the big screen by Harrison Ford. It turned out NASA had no idea he had hacked them, and the journalists had fallen for his bragging without knowing how to verify the claims. But… is there such a thing as bad publicity?

Then he bought and sold companies, and his fortune grew. At one point he had to go live in Thailand, fearing a judicial investigation. Even so, he was briefly arrested there too, introducing himself to the authorities as “His Royal Highness King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire.” Could he have been inspired by the kompir—the potato from the Bulgarian town of Samokov, so famous in Thailand?

He stepped into the spotlight in 2001 with his company Kimvestor, which sold ultra-luxury goods. During the Formula 1 race in Monaco, the principality's monarch at the time, Prince Rainier, was a guest at a party on his 73-meter yacht.

A documentary about the illegal Gumball 3000 rally shows Herr Schmitz driving a Mercedes at 240 kilometers per hour and having a blast while the police pull over one of his rivals. He's also into video games and for a long time held first place in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 rankings among more than 15 million players online!

The Good, the Bad and Kim

I did say there would be dramatic twists here, didn't I? It's only 2005, and our massive hero turns into a superstar and a multimillionaire! At the dawn of cloud technology, he and some friends created the hosting service Megaupload. Six or seven years would pass before the big players caught on to how important file sharing in the cloud was. Our Kim, meanwhile, sensed that computers and networks were now fast and refined enough to let you keep your information on secure remote servers without worrying about it.

Well, with one caveat in this case: other users had access to the files too, and a monthly chart of the most downloaded files was published… And, as you can guess, the top spots went to the biggest box-office blockbusters of the moment, something Hollywood would never forgive Kim for.

By then he was a superstar and began flaunting his wealthy lifestyle in every way possible. It was in 2005 that Kim Schmitz departed for good, and, even on paper, Kim Dotcom was born (albeit weighing around 130 kilograms). Neatly laundered and dried of his criminal past (as we'd put it in our parts of the world), he became a beloved tech guru and a frequent guest on the most-watched TV shows.

Megaupload quickly became a mega-sensation—it was the first service of its kind, one that would pave the way for others, while the rules of the game were still being written. The interest was enormous: at the peak of its popularity the platform reached 180 million registered users and 50 million visits every day. A full 4 percent of all internet traffic in the world was tied to the site of this larger-than-life character at the epicenter of the venture, which made him world-famous!

Herr Flick

2012 didn't turn out to be fatal for the world, despite the predictions of the Maya and their fans. But it did for MegaUpload. One of the most successful sites suddenly found itself in the crosshairs of the American authorities.

One sunny day, every user of the file cloud who tried to access their files was greeted by a friendly notice saying the American authorities had ordered access to the page blocked. Everyone who had decided to upload their family photos or favorite music there lost access to them for good. Because Dotcom and his empire of media superstars had become a target of the authorities.

Those were the romantic days of the internet, when the authorities, at least in the US, could still afford something like that, for better or worse. Those days slipped away almost unnoticed, at the moment it turned out that the mammoths could decide whether the sitting American president had the right to speak. Since then, the most dramatic scene involving the tech giants has been Musk walking into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink.

At Home with the Dotcoms

Far more dramatic was the scene of the commandos who turned up at Kim Dotcom's mansion in New Zealand. An idyllic country unaccustomed to such scenes—years later its prime minister himself would have to publicly apologize to our hero for the unjustifiably rough arrest, after which he ended up in prison.

“Helicopters, rifles, special forces, vicious dogs and 72 cops terrorized a family that's no threat to anyone,” Herr Dotcom later sang in a music video devoted to the episode. “We were shocked by the unusual arrest for unintentional internet copyright infringement brought by the US, which isn't even a crime in New Zealand,” he recalls.

Whether Kim landed on the faraway island because he anticipated such a turn of events, we can only guess. Still, a certain hint in that direction may be the fact that three of his closest co-creators of MegaUpload also happened, by some coincidence, to be in New Zealand at the fateful moment for the company.

Kim says he chose the place for the peace and the clean air he wanted for his children. He settled on the island in 2009; before that his main home was in Hong Kong. To this day he holds German and Finnish passports and says he is more American than the American authorities who have hounded him. According to wagging tongues, each of those places was chosen because it was far from Western justice.

Stop, Thief! Cries the Thief

Think Bulgarian justice is slow? Well, from 2012 to the present day, New Zealand's still hasn't managed to decide whether to extradite our hero to stand trial in the US. The heirs of the Maori clearly aren't in a hurry.

Only months ago, 11 years after the large-scale operation, two of Kim's colleagues struck a deal with the prosecution. They pleaded guilty, agreeing to serve out token sentences in the idyllic country without the risk of being sent back to their native America. The fourth defendant died of a fatal illness. And Kim keeps fighting the justice system.

Not that he's wasting his time in the meantime. He created Mega—as the name suggests, a service similar to Megaupload (with the flashy domain me.ga, no less), which he launched with a spectacular show featuring equally spectacular dancers. He shot songs and music videos giving his own version of how the case unfolded and of his innocence.

He tried further businesses, such as his own cryptocurrency trading platform, which raised very serious funding before declaring bankruptcy.

He founded an internet party, which won 1.42 percent of the vote in New Zealand's 2014 parliamentary elections. Alas, even though around that time he earned the prime minister's official apology, it did nothing for his electoral rise, and four years later his share of the vote had sunk far behind the decimal point.

And yet today he never stops flaunting his wealth and his life. The idyll he has built, now with six children. And although he split with Mona, the mother of children number two through five, he found love again in yet another future mother—and all six kids were conceived through IVF.

Kim Jong Com

“I'm not a pirate, I'm an innovator,” our hero likes to repeat. And those words raise another question for me, about tech leaders. Is it right that so much of our future today depends on people who reached the top of the tech food chain not only because of their skills and morals? Like Kim… or Musk, or Sam Altman—the list is long.

The charges brought by the US authorities certainly didn't paint him as the most exemplary citizen. Besides copyright infringement, the list included financial fraud, racketeering and money laundering. You can ask Assange or Snowden—once those institutions decide to make you look blacker than the devil, they know how to do it. And yet… evidently the evidence isn't quite as convincing as it ought to be, given that Kim still enjoys his freedom.

He is adamant that he didn't break the rules and that this was simply the natural evolution of communication on the internet. “Megaupload was created as a service that lets you send large files, because email had limits, and it still does to this day. The popularity and the initial growth were tied to that. The company wasn't created with the idea of becoming some kind of pirate paradise. If the American government says we are a mega-conspiracy, a mafia that built a criminal network of pirates, they are completely wrong. Their goal was to shut the project down under Hollywood's influence and then figure it out as they went along. By trying to hack the legal system.”

“I'm not evil, you know? I'm a good person. Everyone who knows me likes me… The prosecutors need to sit down at the table, come to their senses and settle this. Because I'm not going to give up. I'll fight to the end. And there's no chance they'll win, because I know I'm innocent.”

Megagame

Besides not shying away from showing off the luxury he lives in, Kim says that today he is a champion of a free internet and of how data is stored. Because we place far too much trust in the biggest companies without being sure how they will use it.

And it's true—we upload our files wherever and however we happen to, we build archives without bothering about what will happen to them. It's convenient to be comfortable. You can ask Kim, too, and not only given his rich life experience, from hacker to billionaire to criminal.

And since we now live in a world of information and big data, this way we supply an enormous volume of information, which is also the most valuable resource for ever more advanced artificial intelligence. From there, one of the usual big questions is whether this makes us easier to manipulate in all sorts of ways.

“There's a danger that the internet will be colonized by a handful of companies or governments. When that happens, the free flow of data will stop and innovation will be stifled. We must not stop fighting against that!”

The Dotcom Bubble

“After tech companies censored the sitting president of the United States, it's a sign that the biggest ones are increasingly getting involved in politics too,” says Kim Il Sung's namesake. “It's natural to ask what they want to get out of it—they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but with some purpose.”

His optimism that the situation will change for the better thanks to technologies like blockchain is intriguing. “There's no way a single project can change the way we communicate. It has to be a network for the people, by the people, open source, decentralized, and I think that's the future. In my view, the tech giants are making a big mistake by underestimating the power of open source and people's willingness to switch to something else.”

Could he be right?

Meanwhile, our data in the cloud sits somewhere, on a physical server that has backup copies, but… could something happen to it without our noticing? That is the subject of the next digital story, as big as Kim and very important…

Left or right? Up!

He believed that when 2030 came, he would wake from the ice to celebrate his 100th birthday. He was convinced that by then we would have reached the heavens and settled other planets. That we would have put our petty squabbles behind us and, lifted on the wings of technology, would be marching onward in human evolution.

Was FM-2030 right? Could the sharp-shooting basketball player still surprise us with a three-pointer of a prediction?

If so, in just seven years we will be able to discuss the details with the man himself. If he really is revived, the forgotten creator of transhumanism, who picked a name like a radio station's, will surely have a lot to tell us… If not, he will become just another dreamer who overestimated humanity and ran ahead of his time.

Fereidoun and the Magic Lamp

It's 2023, and many people write that it feels like the '90s. There is some truth to that: we keep splitting along yet another fault line of the day's outrage, as a nation and as a civilization. Locked inside our bubbles, we find it ever easier, and ever fiercer, to draw the next dividing line through a monument, a currency or a vaccine.

Could the world have been different? No wars, all of us discussing progress in space, huge breakthroughs in medicine, society's agenda devoted to how we use technology and how we grow as individuals, as persons, as a species…

That is how today's hero posed the big question half a century ago. Born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, a name straight out of One Thousand and One Nights, he went down in history under his fourth and final name, one that would suit an heir of Musk better: FM-2030.

Transhumanism: the strand of futurism that believes it is time for humans to carry their evolution further. That technological progress is here not only to help us fight over Facebook and nuclear bombs, but also to let us touch new worlds. To fly between planets, not as part of state policy or propaganda, but as the natural, evolutionary development of human beings who create the next steps of their own evolution…

Check with a Pawn

What kind of name is FM-2030? The first part is the initials of his birth name (and more besides); the second is the year in which he believed he would be woken from the ice where his (officially) dead body ended up.

But long before reaching that moment, Fereidoun was born in 1930 in Brussels, into a family of Iranian diplomats. His life set off on a cosmopolitan course, which surely shaped his later views. By the time he turned 11, he had already lived in 17 countries. He spent a good deal of time in India; they say he spoke English with an accent all his life.

He went to primary schools in England and Iran and graduated from a Jesuit college in Jerusalem. At 18 he was already fluent in four foreign languages: English, Hebrew, French and Arabic.

He began his studies at Berkeley and finished them at the University of California. He coped well with his studies, but his great passion as a kid was sport. It took him to the first Olympic Games after World War II. At just 18, he was part of Iran's national basketball team. According to some, he also competed in Olympic wrestling, but on this point the archives contradict each other.

Toward a Radiant Future

The Persian team never made it out of the group stage, and that turned out to be the end of the futurist's professional sporting career.

At the time, his country was the arena of fierce battles between rival factions, backed by the states that had just plunged into the Cold War. One more clue as to why Fereidoun would become such a cosmopolitan figure, loathing both the limits of states and civilizations and war itself.

Done with sport, he turned to philosophy. Little by little he established himself as a scholar, teaching at universities in New York, Los Angeles and Florida. He also ventured into the thickets of fiction, publishing three novels that became quite popular and earned him a decent income.

In the '50s he worked for the UN, following the diplomatic path his parents had trodden before him. Thanks to his wide-ranging knowledge, from 1952 he sat on the commission tasked with resolving the Palestinian question.

In 1957 the New York Times ran an interview with him on mental illness in Asia and Africa. He described himself as “an Iranian now living in the United States” and “a freelance writer specializing in the study of social problems in underdeveloped societies.” Oh, how quickly that description was about to change…

FM+

To this day the Palestinian question remains unresolved, and so does the big question to which he devoted his life: our future as a species. Which brings us to the late '70s, when Fereidoun became world-famous for his predictions and his worldview.

He predicted the imminent arrival of in vitro technology, something that still looked like science fiction. He described a future in which conferences and events would be held over a network, with no need for people to be in the same place. He talked about the coming of remote shopping and telemedicine.

The peak of his fame came in 1989, when he published his best-known book, Are You a Transhumanist?: Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth in a Rapidly Changing World.

By then he had long ceased to be Fereidoun; FM-2030 had taken the stage as early as 1972.

He officially changed his passport in 1988, because “conventional names carry too much cultural baggage, such as nationality, religion and social background,” and in his view they no longer suited the present day. He said the letters were not necessarily tied to his initials but also stood for “Future Man,” “Future Modular” and “Future Marvel.”

Rather modest, wouldn't you say? A futurist Chuck Norris…

Play the video

As Simple and Logical as That

“I am not the person I was ten years ago, and I certainly won't be in 20 years. The name reflects my conviction that the years around 2030 will be a magical time. We will no longer age, and everyone will have the chance to live forever. 2030 is a dream and a goal.”

And really, Shakespeare notwithstanding, isn't a name very often what defines us? What places us in context, makes us part of our surroundings or outsiders to them?

Of course, FM was above all a provocateur; at the root of his ideas lay the obvious utopia of a world in which technology has developed along the most optimistic scenario. That “technological progress will allow people to become synthetic, post-biological organisms with eternal life.”

Fu-Turist

However much we talk about transhumanism with fear, as a modernized version of eugenics, in the 20th century especially it was an optimistic movement. One that, among other things, turned out to be right in quite a few directions. Yes, by the strict rules of biology we humans are still the same species as those of millennia ago… and yet the change in our daily lives, and through it in everything else, is undeniable.

The dramatically longer human lifespan, advanced medicine, the incredible leap in communications and in how we store and manage our data. Even spaceflight, however much its achievements today lack the magical aura of the '60s.

So, although we belong to the same biological species, we are already different. Because of the way we get our information, because of the way events unfold. Because of speed. Because of memory. Because of our inability to concentrate…

Then shouldn't we pay attention to forecasting, especially when it comes from someone with a serious résumé who managed to predict real discoveries and phenomena in so many fields?

Icy Silence

It's a fact that in many places the former Fereidoun misses the mark. He writes, for instance, that “in 2010 the world will reach a new stage in its history. The family will have given way to universal life. People will come together and part according to their needs, free of kinship and possessions. Life expectancy will be infinite, and disease practically eliminated. Death will be rare, accidental and not forever….”

Well, death is still here, what with pandemics and wars in the heart of the supposedly most civilized world… clearly the interesting part lies not in the extremes but, as usual, in the nuances.

“Genetic engineering to enhance the brain. Implants for a direct brain interface. Implants for direct monitoring of all bodily functions. By 2010 the human brain should already be a supercomputer, independent of the animal body, which can be freely replaced…,” the futurist sketches. He obviously got the year wrong, but as for everything else, isn't it really just around the corner?

He also says: “No civilization of the past was great. All were primitive and persecuting, built on mass submission and mass murder.” It was he who said that “there are no illegal immigrants, only obsolete borders.”

And I wonder… have his words lost all meaning for our supposedly advanced civilizations today?

Nostalgia for the Future

He was a vegetarian all his life, saying he couldn't eat anything that had had a mother.

He defined his views not as left or right but as “up”: toward progress, as opposed to the quick fixes of the day within what he considered an outdated framework. He published three manifestos, the best known being that of the “Upwingers” (by analogy with left-wingers and right-wingers) from 1973. That, he believed, was our important battle: progress against the retrograde, advancement against stagnation, flight to other worlds against staying here on Earth.

In his view it was time to abandon all the ideologies we had used so far, because they were unfit for the new age: communism as well as capitalism. Nationalism, totalitarianism, nihilism. The moment had come to keep only two of them: optimism and universalism.

Re-Contra-Utopia

“We need to develop a bold new philosophy of the future,” says FM. “A hopeful outlook that will encourage people to want to face the future. To want to plan it. I am an optimist, and what I have to share runs against all the pessimism around us.”

When asked about his nationality or his age, he wouldn't answer, because those questions were irrelevant and he was a “global person.” “I am a 21st-century person who happened to be born in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.” Oh, if only he had guessed that, with almost a quarter of this century gone, we would not be all that far along, at least when it comes to civilizational choices…

As his rich photo archive shows, in his later years he lived quite well, traveling on yachts and touring the world's resorts. And he took photos, and more photos, including a sizable collection of erotic shots. Although all his life he preached that the idea of the family was obsolete, from 1960 until his death he remained “in friendship” with Flora Schnall, a lawyer and Harvard lecturer.

Death Is a Lonely Business

What's more interesting isn't even how strongly he believed in such an idea in times when not even the internet had been invented. It's that he held on to it afterward, right up to the end of the millennium; optimism never left him. But life did… at least temporarily.

In the year 2000, FM-2030 died and became one of the first people to be deep-frozen in the hope of one day being woken by future humans who have developed technology advanced enough not only to thaw him out but also to cure him of all disease.

Of course, all of this becomes even more interesting in the realm of faith. Because the hero with the alternative name built his ideas on atheism and distrust of all ideologies. Yet he set against them another faith, in technology. That it really would develop so far as to pull us forward as a species… or the other way around?

And then, here is a movement that denies reincarnation… yet believes that one day it will prove itself right precisely through a resurrection?!

According to FM-2030, the human lifespan would become unlimited thanks to the artificial organs we would be able to create. Shortly before his death, he described the pancreas as a “stupid, dumb, wretched organ.”

Well, it was deadly cancer of that very “wretched” organ that took him. And so he became the first person not merely frozen but cryonically preserved, placed at temperatures so low that flesh comes to resemble glass.

Guests from the Future

Even for his time he was too extreme; The New York Times described his predictions as a “Santa Claus machine.” Today, too, his words sound rather naive, given an optimism that time has not borne out. And yet it is astonishing how accurate he turned out to be about the directions he foresaw: the internet and genetic modification, bionics and 3D printing, online shopping and remote meetings.

So was he a dreamer, a visionary or a naïf? Sometimes a person can be all three at once. Look at Musk, who was supposedly so driven toward Mars, and today is looking for a spectacular way to fight (or pretend to fight) with his little buddies.

“I will be so happy when I come back,” he said in an interview shortly before he passed away. 2030 is close. Even in transhumanism, blessed are the believers. And the incurable optimists…

Did Fereidoun have grounds for this prediction? We only have to wait seven more years to find out. Will we harness ourselves to our progress as a species, will we defeat death? Let's hope he turns out to be right after all…

Special thanks to Mario Mishev for helping create this Digital Story!

Remember when we used to collect all sorts of things: stamps, napkins, postcards, photos… even memories?

The year is 2000. One of the great scientists of his time begins an unusual experiment. Day and night he will wear a camera around his neck that records every moment of his daily life. The idea is to miss nothing! His life will be captured and duly documented, so he can go back to any moment of it, and why not… one day relive it virtually?

Gordon Bell is a world-famous computer scientist, and one of the most prestigious awards in computing bears his name. But the experiment he undertook—recording every second of his life—gives us far more today than his scientific research. One way or another, it shows where we are all headed.

His idea sounds like a joke… because it has already become everyday practice. Yes, we leave a huge trail online of every minute we live. And it doesn't impress us, doesn't please us, doesn't even make us ask what the consequences might be.

Do you dream of remembering every important moment of your life? The first kiss, your newborn's first smile, that unforgettable meeting that showed you how to change your life?

Today it is easier than ever. And at the same time harder, more challenging, even… more dangerous.

There's a Log-ic to It

“Lifelogging”—“recording one's life.” The good old biography, but with a new, technological dimension. There was one famous lifelogger before we all turned into lifeloggers, and his name is Gordon Bell.

The turn of the century was a time of great enthusiasm for new technology. Suddenly we found ourselves connected in a worldwide network, and it would gradually spread to every one of us.

By then Gordon had already built up vast experience in the world of computers.

Born in 1934, he had traveled the whole road from the house-sized computers with their primitive skills. His father owned an electronics store, and that was the field Gordon fell for as a child. He went on to study electrical engineering at MIT, and then the road took him to Australia for further training. That was when two exciting encounters happened, and both turned into love. With his future wife, Gwen, and… with software. In 1957, when the field was still considered exotic and people argued over whether it would survive at all, he became fired up by the idea not so much of building machinery as of finding ways to control it.

Over the following decades he became a leading scientist in countless areas of computing. In 1972 he wrote “Bell's Law of Computer Classes,” which defined the natural life cycle of computer systems. Even then he predicted that every 10 years a new generation of technological solutions would appear and change the world drastically.

Then… it began happening before all our eyes. In a 1992 interview, Mr. Bell confidently declared that “in 25 years computers will be just like telephones! And they will be communicating all the time!”

The Life and Sufferings of Sinful Gordon

Evidently the namesake of ALF and Sting had a feel not only for technology but for business too, because in 1995 he joined Microsoft, then in full swing of its global domination.

And so we reach the turn of the century, which finds Gordon as a leading researcher for the undisputed giant of the day. He has turned to technologies for remote communication—as he puts it himself, “being somewhere without being there.” It is in this role that the scientist launches the MyLifeBits project—“bits of my life.” The lab he heads studies how information technology makes communication easier. The first primitive possibilities of digital photography have only just appeared.

Gordon loves his work so much that he decides the experiment will not be run with volunteers—he will play the lab mouse himself.

And so a digital camera ends up around his neck, programmed to take a picture every 30 seconds. But that is far from all—the scientist wants to gather as many “traces” of his life as he can. Gradually he scans all his articles, lectures, presentations, notes. He saves the films he has watched, the books he has read. He starts recording every phone call. Then he adds his health metrics—data on his pulse at every moment, his temperature.

Digitize This

Big deal, you'll say. Today, a quarter of a century later, almost everyone does it. You can log into your Google account and recall where you were a year ago and what you were doing. The search engine keeps a history of your communication and your everyday searches, from the very first day you opened it. Each of us piles up thousands of photos we almost never have time to look at. So what's so interesting about the lifelogger?

An experiment that turns out to be prophetic, and conclusions that apply with full force to us, today's ordinary lifeloggers who have landed in the age of artificial intelligence.

Gordon was inspired by the work of Vannevar Bush, a renowned scientist and Roosevelt's adviser during the Second World War. In 1945 Bush predicted the creation of a machine called the “memex”—a blend of the words “memory” and “index.” He imagined it as a kind of desk that would scan, find connections and then retrieve information from an enormous volume of all sorts of data. He described a fair number of technical details too—it would use a camera and microfilm.

In his manifesto “As We May Think,” Bush put forward the idea that we would use technology to extend the capabilities of our own brains. On that point he certainly turned out to be right, unlike on microfilm…

The Vampire Diaries

Attempts at lifelogging were not long in coming. Robert Shields decided to describe everything that happened to him in 5-minute intervals. He did it for a quarter of a century—from 1972 to 1997! The result? The longest diary in history, at 37 million words. Robert was clearly a writer, not a reader.

Gordon Bell decides to look for a somewhat more modern solution. To put all the information about his life into a single system that would let him reproduce any moment gone by…

Bell decides he will become the first person with no need for paper and will digitize everything important to him. (Was that perhaps yet another prophecy of sorts?) At first, most of the work falls to his assistant, Vicki, who takes on “the great scanning.” Notebooks full of jottings, electricity and heating bills. His archive begins with a photo of his mother shortly after she was born in 1900.

Soon two more researchers join the recording—his colleagues from the Microsoft lab. They help him build software to make it easier to collect and classify the records.

Little by little the data becomes useful. Once, after speaking with his doctor, Gordon can't remember all the advice he has been given, so he listens to the conversation again. When a friend of his dies, he buries himself in their 20 years of correspondence to prepare a eulogy.

A Moment Like Eternity

“At the start the experiment made me very smug,” Gordon recalls. “I became a sort of family librarian, because I could settle arguments about when someone's birthday was or when a bill had come in. My main idea was that nothing should be kept on paper. Paper is awful, because you can't search it automatically.”

The venture, alas, does not please his wife at all. “We'd be talking and every now and then she'd ask, ‘You're not recording this, are you?’ And I'd laugh and admit that I was recording everything. And she'd start shouting, ‘Delete it! Delete it!’” Only Bell doesn't like deleting anything—that is the core of his experiment's philosophy.

Forgetting certainly makes us human. It is the very function that saves our brains from overload. Filtering information makes us creative and creates the magic of everyday life. But doesn't it also deprive us of many possibilities?

At first he is frightened by the lack of enough storage. In just a month he has collected 1 gigabyte of data, and he calculates that logging the life of a 72-year-old would take between 1 and 3 terabytes—almost impossible figures at the time. It's enough to say how fast things change: 1 gigabyte of storage cost $10 million in 1956, and half a century later, $1. But there is a flip side too—every new generation of technology demands ever more storage…

Where Bell Has Been

In 2009 Gordon and his colleagues published the book Total Recall, recounting the entire experiment. It makes clear that, besides preserving memories, the idea of lifelogging is to help people discover useful patterns and so improve their lives. Bell, who had undergone two heart bypass operations in the meantime, analyzes the data to find links between his diet, his exercise and his angina symptoms. He says this helped him avoid the need for a third operation.

From here comes the idea that we are only beginning to see more and more software that helps us extract patterns from the chaos of ever-growing data. Well, so far this has hardly proved an accurate forecast, though perhaps progress in that direction will come soon, with the help of artificial intelligence.

In the book Bell predicts that by 2020 people will be recording everything they see and hear. Here at least, in my view, he proves no less right than with his forecast about mobile phones decades earlier…

Call That a Life, to Write It Down

“No one ever returns anywhere,” wrote the Bulgarian poet Ivan Peychev. And indeed, every attempt to preserve the past in full is doomed to fail. Melancholy and nostalgia are pleasant feelings, and there are moments we want to recall. But even the most convincing multimedia attempt to record them is doomed to remain incomplete. If only because of the context in which they are reborn.

Ask Gordon. The project officially lasted 7 years, during which he recorded everything. But today, when asked about those times, he says that “lifelogging didn't turn out to be something that added value to my life.”

In his view, the reason is that the technology of the time was not yet mature enough for such a challenge. The price of computer storage is now so low, we're seeing huge progress in artificial intelligence, and breakthroughs in battery development are on the way. So very soon it will be possible to have true lifelogging—storing terabytes of data about every moment…

Gordon doesn't say how this would differ from his experience with the photos. Well, I think I can give you a hint. The moment from the past will become ever more realistically reproducible. We will be able to return to something that looks more and more like reality. Everyone will have their own ever more complete “time shelter”… but will they have the time and the desire to step into it? Experience so far points rather to a negative answer. The price of melancholy will simply be a little lower. The physical price, at least, not the emotional one…

Pics or It Didn't Happen

“Meanwhile we already have a real memex—it's the smartphone,” says Bell. And while his experiment did capture the direction in which we would record more and more data about our daily lives and physical condition, he admits he never suspected we would gradually arrive at oversharing this kind of data through social networks. That “lifelogging” would be replaced by “lifeblogging”—telling everyone about everything in our lives right away, rather than keeping it for ourselves, or at least for a limited number of people.

One of the great paradoxes of modern technology is that we surround ourselves with ever more data and leave ever more behind us, while we remember less and less.

Artificial intelligence has long been here; we see some of the fruits of its labor every day the moment we open our favorite social network. Because it is the algorithms that steered us into the groove of personalized content and bubbles.

And what will happen when they become even more perfect and get even more of our “lifelogged” data? They will know us better than our best friend. They will be ever more successful at recommending things to us, making things easier for us, entertaining us…

And manipulating us.

And also—reproducing us, with everything that follows from that. Even after we're gone.

Life on Tape

But let's return to our friend Gordon, who is now of venerable age. He says his wish was to start recording every moment of his life, knowing that soon we would all be doing it.

But he also believes the idea was far more characteristic of his generation. He remembers how as a boy he started collecting razor blades… And later he collected all sorts of things. The idea of collecting, Gordon says, is so remote to the generations that came after. “Back then we thought we would collect memories that we would pass down from generation to generation, passing on as many of them as we wished. I imagined it as a kind of immortality…”

Maybe there's a logic to it? Hardly anyone would have the time to “watch” their grandfather's whole life, or even a week of it. But if we have all our days stored, we can pick out the best when the time comes to hand them on to those who follow.

As long as we don't hurry too much. Lately we're always in a hurry…

Can It Be Forgotten, Gordon?

Of course, all our lifelogging today can be useful in many different ways. The benefits of devices tracking our pulse and other health metrics are obvious. And if we know how we spend our time, won't that help us be more successful? There are plenty of popular solutions along those lines… as long, of course, as we don't turn them into yet another cause of digital stress.

Today Gordon hopes we are nearing the end of the era of oversharing, that people will begin to realize they are leaving a lasting digital footprint, with all the problems it will bring them. At the same time, we will come to value more the data we hold about ourselves. “I tell people they should never, ever delete anything at all. Whether from their memories or their records,” says the scientist. “Even if it's painful, you can use it as a pointer to something else.”

“People say, ‘Oh, what you're doing is revolutionary!’” he recounted at the start of the experiment. “I answer them, ‘No, no, it's evolutionary. Because the same thing is happening to you. It's happening now, while we talk…’”

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Probably depends on how motivated they are. But you'll be surprised to learn that just three are enough to create… YouTube.

In the beginning it was quite different. Because the platform that became a synonym for video content was originally supposed to be a dating site. Three former PayPal employees launched the project in early 2005, and less than two years later Google bought it for $1.65 billion!

Here is the little-known, twist-filled story of one of the giants of the digital world. Of the site that made video unimaginably easy to share. Of the project that for many years ranked among the three most visited pages on the planet.

Limelight

Was the venture's success down to luck, to enterprise, to instinct? To landing at the epicenter at exactly the right moment? You could say it was a bit of all of these.

Ever since he was a boy, Chad Hurley couldn't decide what he wanted to do. His great love was art, but he was also strongly drawn to technology. And while today such a career choice has plenty of logical paths, at the end of the 1990s that was not the case at all. He had to choose between the two, and his heart led him to drawing.

In 1999 he graduated in fine arts from a university in Indiana, and the time came to look for a job. For a long while he wondered whether to start out as a teacher, but one day, while reading the newspaper (yes, back then young people still did that too), he came across an ad that caught his eye. It was a technology company looking for a designer. Here was the long-awaited chance for Chad to work with art and technology at the same time!

Just Like in the Movies

Ever heard of a company called Confinity? Neither had I, and Chad knew next to nothing about it when he went to the job interview. They asked him to quickly sketch a logo for a future project of theirs, something to do with payments. He handled the improvised task so well that his drawing became one of the most recognizable trademarks in the online world to this day. No, it's too early to turn to video sharing—we're talking about PayPal here.

Confinity worked on cybersecurity software, but at the start of the new millennium its managers concluded that one of the revolutions the mass internet would bring was coming to the world of payments. Soon the whole company was renamed PayPal, and the work focused precisely on building a system that would make it easy for people to send and receive money over the web. PayPal made it possible to transfer money online and became an electronic alternative to traditional checks and bank transfers.

A young, motivated team capable of miracles came together. Chad had landed in a wonderful place, where he quickly made friends with his colleagues. Above all with two programmers—Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Steve was born in Taiwan and came to the US when he was 8, and learning the language cost him enormous effort. He and Jawed both studied computer science in Illinois, but dropped out after receiving tempting offers to work at the future PayPal.

Modern Times

The very beginning of the millennium was a dynamic period for life online. Everyone was excited about the possibilities the internet offered, and a huge number of companies sprang up to develop all kinds of promising projects. But it soon became clear that the technology was not yet advanced enough, and people were not yet online in large enough numbers. This led to the crisis known as the dot-com bubble. Many companies went bankrupt and let their employees go.

PayPal, however, pulled through, thanks to a series of important, quick decisions. Such as merging with the startup x.com, headed by an ambitious young man named… Elon Musk. The company not only survived, but in 2002 it was acquired by the online retail giant eBay for what was then an unthinkable $1.5 billion. All of this laid the foundation of Musk's enormous fortune, which made his later, most significant ventures possible.

But what happened to our three heroes—Chad, Steve and Jawed? Nothing much. Except that they suddenly found themselves transported from a small, likable company with friendly relationships into a giant with all its typical corporate and commercial dimensions. Chad left right after the deal; his two colleagues held out for a few more months before they, too, became convinced the new environment wasn't for them.

They tried different things. Chad started a company making laptops, but quickly realized that the big breakthroughs were possible not in the hardware world but in software, where you can build something truly big quickly and without a large investment.

Don't Make a Movie Out of It!

And so we find ourselves in a café near Chad's home (yes, not in a garage, as Silicon Valley tradition demands). A few years have passed, the three are out of work, but they walked away from the sale with decent bonuses that allow them to start a business of their own.

But what kind? They weighed a platform for bloggers, some form of social network, or a dating site. They decided the last direction was the most promising, inspired by the site Hot or Not, where you rated whether the people in the photos the site showed you were attractive.

A designer and two programmers, they discussed and discussed ideas until they settled on one: a platform where people would meet their other halves by presenting themselves in short videos.

No sooner said than done! The three already had experience; they knew it was important to seize the moment fast and get the project to some initial stage, just enough to check whether things worked. So the site youtube.com was registered… on February 14, 2005, of all days.

YourTVset

It's said that the platform's name was also invented on that Valentine's Day, which is why they hurried to register it. The idea was for it to carry the message of a “personal television.” That's what YouTube means—“your TV set,” since alongside the official word “television,” English has the very popular colloquial term “tube.”

At that time neither Facebook nor Twitter existed; Google was already around, but far from its present position as an online empire.

Back then, however, internet speeds had unexpectedly improved, and suddenly it had become possible to exchange video, too. The three correctly sensed this, but not the exact direction. They came up with a motivating slogan: “Tune in, Hook up!”

They began inviting attractive young women, offering them 20 dollars each to upload a video introduction of themselves to the new dating site… and perhaps we're lucky it didn't work out well enough; it's easy to imagine what kind of content it might soon have become.

The three opted for unconventional technical solutions—they settled on the then-rising Flash platform, which had just “set in motion” web pages by making it possible to upload video and animations. As technology advanced it quickly became obsolete, but at that moment it turned out to be the right choice.

Stories in Pictures

The months went by, and candidates looking for a girlfriend or boyfriend were still nowhere to be seen. The three never quite remember who exactly suggested changing direction—turning the platform into a place where people could share all kinds of videos.

Chad says the idea came while they were discussing how hard it had been to exchange the clips they'd shot while visiting Steve. According to Jawed, though, the idea came after he remembered the notorious Super Bowl final a year earlier, when Justin Timberlake supposedly accidentally bared Janet Jackson's breast. He never managed to find a clip of the incident online, and so he decided to propose a venture that would make sharing easier.

What is known for certain, however, is the first clip uploaded to YouTube, and it can still be watched today! April 23, 2005: Jawed Karim shows himself strolling around the San Diego Zoo.

Play the video

Although the site was running before that, its official launch came on December 15. By then it already had 8 million views a day, even though at first clips were limited to just 30 seconds.

From then on they didn't even need to pay their first guests. Things developed at a dizzying pace. So much so that less than a year later the site would make them richer by… more than 1 billion dollars!

The Eighth Art

At first the battle seemed almost impossible. It turns out that the other platform we know today—Vimeo—appeared even earlier, in November 2004, but never managed to match the success of our three heroes. In 2004 Windows had made its Media Player install automatically along with the operating system. Every one of the big companies sensed that video content would become the next big success, but it came precisely to the three enthusiasts. How? Perhaps because they were the first to build a fast and sufficiently convenient site. The ability to easily share videos and embed them in other pages certainly helped, too.

A Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho became the first clip to reach a million views. An NBC series also appeared on the platform and was watched millions of times. In the end it was removed at the network's request, but that turned into extra publicity.

By July 2006, 65,000 clips were being uploaded every day, and views reached 100 million a day.

Can heavy traffic become a problem? Interestingly, around that time a company selling pipes and tubes sued the three. Its site was constantly down because it sat on the domain www.utube.com, and far too many people visited it looking for the video platform.

Get Out of Here

In any case, they settled out of court. But such enormous interest was bound to attract other, more important attention as well. Serious bidding followed, until the three agreed to sell their venture to Google. Yes, they split their share of the famous $1.65 billion not in cash but in Google stock, but the online giant's subsequent growth made them even wealthier.

What happened next to the three newly minted billionaires? Mostly… they enjoyed their fame. Chad stayed at the helm of YouTube for a while, then took on the role of adviser. He tried various startups that achieved no impressive success, and invested in Formula 1 and NBA teams. Steve delved into computer science and also tried his hand in the startup world without making big news. Not much has been heard of Karim, apart from a brief moment of fame when he changed the description of the famous first zoo video to protest the platform's idea of removing the dislike button.

Meanwhile, YouTube never stopped growing and breaking records. It piled up market share and developed a huge system for advertising and content creation. Today you can even use a free studio in Los Angeles to shoot your clips…, if you're one of the vloggers who have managed to gather at least 10,000 followers.

Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo

Gradually politicians appeared, too; the first to have the courage, in 2007, was Tony Blair.

Miracles never stop happening on this platform. Like the story of MrBeast—one of the most popular vloggers, with his remarkable social experiments, such as giving away… an island. YouTube created its own stars and became an industry that is still strong enough to fight for the top spots against young, ambitious rivals like TikTok.

The most subscribers today—220 million—belong to an Indian film company. In 2012 the irritating K-pop hit “Gangnam Style” became the first to reach 1 billion views, but… who do you think leads today? You'll be surprised. As of 2023 the record, at 12.5 billion, is held by… the children's song Baby Shark, known in Bulgaria in a local version as “Baby Whale.”

Today more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to the platform every minute. Last year advertising revenue exceeded $28 billion, and users number close to 3 billion…

So if you think a good idea can't possibly make you rich, remember the three friends. Online, all kinds of miracles definitely never stop happening…

You know, certain other mythical figures create the world in a week. Brendan Eich took a little longer—10 days—to create another new world we all live in… JavaScript. A technology that changed our everyday lives by making it possible to build complex applications online. To open the browser, head to our favorite page and find it capable of miracles.

What follows is a cautionary tale about how a man who landed almost by accident at the epicenter of events can build something enormous. About how, in technologically turbulent times, fate quickly changes its favorites, and with a single blink of its eye you can go from hero to outsider.

Who is this Brendan Eich, anyway? Why, like other computer legends, does he enjoy so little fame today? How was JavaScript born, and why was it this language, supposedly so similar to the others, that managed to revolutionize the way we use computers?

console.log(“Here we go!”);

Java Street

These days languages are starting to look more and more alike. Both programming languages and human ones… This one, though, has a special place for me. It's how I earn my living, and for all its stubbornness, it is not only capable of miracles but creates them every single day.

Today each of us uses JavaScript constantly, thousands of times over. It is the only language that lets applications “run” in the browser, the one that made it possible to turn the old static pages of pictures and words into huge applications—social networks, media outlets, shopping platforms and who knows what else.

Broadly speaking, programming internet applications today has two sides—front end and back end. The latter is everything that sits on the server and reaches us only when we request it, while the former is what happens in your browser.

Today JS is everywhere—it offers a wonderful alternative for back-end programming, and on the front end it reigns without competition, with no end to its rule in sight. JavaScript is often mocked, most often precisely because of its main advantage—it was designed to be as easy and convenient as possible… which also makes it just as easy and convenient to give yourself serious headaches.

Java… Script-ed

Java and JavaScript… sounds like the same thing, right? About as much as ham and hamster. Of course, the similarity in the names, as will become clear, is no coincidence.

Millions of people around the world (and tens of thousands in Bulgaria) make a living with JavaScript, yet hardly half of them could tell you who Brendan Eich is. Even if you look him up on Wikipedia, you'll see he is known for “JavaScript, Mozilla and his opposition to same-sex marriage.” A bit dismissive for the man who made today's internet possible, don't you think?

You've probably never heard of the Mosaic browser, created back in distant 1993. It is remarkable for being the first with a graphical interface accessible to ordinary users. In other words—a program you open, type in an address, and a page starts loading.

A year later the project's creators founded the Netscape corporation with the idea of building an even better browser. And they succeeded—Netscape Navigator quickly came to dominate the market and was a hit in the late 1990s. If you were among the Bulgarian internet pioneers, you surely remember it. And the memory takes you back to the days when downloading a single picture from the web took minutes…

Eich, Eich, Baby!

In 1995 the programmers decided to add a scripting language to it, so that websites could become more dynamic than simply displaying pictures and text. In parallel they signed two contracts with developers—with the company Sun Microsystems, to offer them a way of bringing its Java language into the “navigator,” and with the aforementioned Brendan, who was to adapt the older language Scheme for the purpose.

Soon, however, both ideas were dropped. History is silent on why things didn't work out with Java's parents. What matters is that Brendan, too… failed. He worked hard on the project, but no matter how much effort he poured in, it became ever clearer to him that using a language built for something else inside the browser was a very bad idea. New inconveniences kept cropping up. So he went back to his employers at Netscape with a far more ambitious idea: to create an entirely new programming language himself.

With a master's degree in computer science, Brendan spent seven years after graduating developing operating systems, then three years writing software for microprocessors… At the time he was 34, just past the age of Christ. The choice of him for such a task was rather unexpected—in college he had done coursework on creating programming languages, but at a fairly amateur level.

Let's not forget, though, that these were the “cowboy” years of technology, the days when unexpected heroes appeared. The programmer said he loved Scheme and liked Java, but proposed creating a simpler language “that could be used by people who don't know what a compiler is. They just load it and start writing code.”

Java the Hutt

Well, his colleagues were close to the deadline for unveiling version 2 of Netscape and were rather skeptical of the idea. Still, they told him to give it a try—but handed him the nearly impossible task of getting it done in 10 days…

You probably don't realize how overwhelming the task Brendan had set himself was. To create a complex, working programming language… something like the mission of Cyril and Methodius, the brothers who gave the Slavs their alphabet, only in the digital age. Yes, by then there were already countless popular languages that resembled each other to varying degrees, but in 10 days he had to come up with something quite different, ready to perform a job that had not existed until then.

Exactly how he managed it within that impossible deadline is unclear. Brendan himself rarely talks about those times—in any case, if communication had been his superpower, today he would be among the tech superstars of our era. We'll get to the reasons why that didn't happen shortly, but here comes the crucial step.

One September morning in 1995 the programmer showed up before the people who had commissioned the project and presented the new language, named after his favorite coffee—Mocha. Then, together with them, he decided to add “script” to the name, to make it clear it was a scripting language that isn't compiled but executed directly by the computer. That's how they arrived at the name LiveScript.

Somehow, though, it didn't sound commercial enough. At the time Java was the cherry on top, and to borrow some of its glory, Brendan and Netscape chose the name JavaScript. To this day it causes confusion among non-specialists—the two languages really are seriously different.

On the Tip of the Tongue

As is now clear, my favorite computer language is a Virgo, which may explain its occasionally prickly character. Brendan's decision to choose a language in which variables are not typed is considered quite revolutionary. A word can quickly turn into a number, which makes programmers' lives much easier. But also the mistakes they make.

“What made JavaScript so powerful, despite all its problems and the flaws of rushed work, was that it could do in the browser everything that average web programmers wanted,” Brendan would later say.

JS turned out to be the paradigm everyone had been looking for, and over the following decades it developed at breakneck speed to conquer the world. Netscape Navigator has long been just a memory for early internet users, but its offspring reigns online with no prospect of surrendering its crown.

In its early years the language was quite different from what we know today—it went through a serious evolution—but its very appearance drastically changed the paradigm.

It proved such a successful solution that Netscape's biggest rival—Microsoft, with its Internet Explorer browser—used reverse engineering to study it and build its own alternative, JScript. For better or worse, it never managed to gain much popularity.

The Brendan Brand

The “battle” between very similar languages grew fierce… and at some point became a serious problem for website builders. Each browser had its own language, different commands did different things, and programming became almost impossible. In 1996 our hero emerged victorious from this battle. Browser makers rallied around his language and entrusted it to ECMA International—the organization that oversees its standardization to this day. And so JavaScript became available to everyone.

In 1998 Brendan was among the founders of Mozilla, which developed the first browser of the modern type we are used to today. Firefox introduced the concept of many open tabs, significantly sped up computers and paved the way for the modern internet. Only later came the dominance of Google's browser, Chrome, which quite openly started out as a copy of the project of Brendan and his colleagues.

Mozilla began as a nonprofit organization aiming to help democratize the internet, and it certainly did a lot in that direction. That, however, also turned out to be its weak spot when it had to pit its projects against huge companies that, on top of everything, were using its open-source code. Even so, the project survived and became a commercial venture, and many believe its successes were largely due to Brendan Eich's insight. For a full 16 years our hero led Mozilla's technology team, then held the post of chief executive officer for… 11 days.

And so we come to the dark side of this story. Brendan was forced to step down after the media brought to light the fact that he had donated to political candidates campaigning against same-sex marriage. He had to admit that this was indeed his personal position, and as a result he had to leave the company.

Braveheart

Brave—that is the name of the project the father of JavaScript has been working on in recent years. The venture aims to create a next-generation browser that would once again help democratize the internet, this time by freeing it from the burden of monopolies. As he himself notes, the goal is to save us from tracking technologies, which, by an irony of fate, rely mainly on… JavaScript. Brave is open source and is developing its own system through which users can reward the authors whose pages they visit. Either way, in its seven years of history, no dizzying success has been heard of.

Ever since he became (part of) Brave, Brendan has bravely spoken out about his views, which today we would describe as conservative. He was among the outspoken critics of the measures taken against COVID, of masks, and of the famous American epidemiologist Dr. Fauci. This proved yet another blow to his image in the mainstream media.

How does Brendan view the development of technology today? In his opinion, artificial intelligence won't take programmers' jobs—on the contrary, it will speed up software development. At the same time, though, it will create many new security challenges.

Well, unlike its creator's fame, JavaScript's is flourishing. JavaScript regularly wins the title of the most used computer language online, with 64.9 percent of programmers saying they use it in their daily work. Of the roughly 1.8 billion websites online in 2022, 98 percent used Brendan's creation in one way or another. The language keeps growing, and new platforms are constantly being created that make it easier to use and ever more popular.

Since its birth it has never stopped evolving—every year ECMA International publishes an updated version, called ECMAScript. Numerous ideas for its development are discussed in the community and pass through three levels of approval before becoming part of the language.

Which matters more, the creator or the creation? Both, of course. But we ought at least to mention the names of the creators who changed the world in one way or another, as Brendan Eich most certainly did…

By all signs, he will be the next big name. He will make the Silicon Valley news that echoes around the world. Have you heard of Sam Altman?

The famous ChatGPT owes its success to him; he runs OpenAI, the company that showed the world how far artificial intelligence has come.

It is clear that Sam still has to get used to the spotlight, just as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk had to. And today his few interviews are worth listening to closely as we look for the big news coming in the world of artificial intelligence.

A programmer who never quite happened, an entrepreneur who has seen both success and failure up close. An innovator who landed in exactly the right place. A visionary without grand words. An American of Jewish descent, the first leader on such a scale who makes no secret of being gay. This figure, still hidden behind the chatbot, has yet to give birth to big stories and big changes. And conspiracy theories, everything that comes with his status.

And one more thing: not long ago he set aside from his “savings” two sums of hundreds of millions of dollars each and gave them to research into dramatically extending human life and the search for cold fusion—a technology that could solve humanity's energy needs for the long term…

Sam All Alone

Until a few months ago his name was far from famous, even though at 38 he had already piled up impressive achievements. Then ChatGPT came along to sweep everything away and change it. Yes, perhaps not so much because of some great technological innovation, but because it reached millions of people around the world and showed them where artificial intelligence already stands. That technology has advanced at breakneck speed and we have unexpectedly found ourselves in the future.

All of this, little by little, pushed the project's “father” to the front. Sam Altman heads OpenAI, the company behind the famous chatbot, behind the GPT-3 algorithm and its long-awaited successor GPT-4, and behind DALL·E, which in turn started the fashion for algorithms that paint impressive images from a description.

Like the other great innovators of the digital age, he is only now becoming a recognizable figure. That is why it is interesting to meet him today, before he settles into his role in the spotlight.

Play the video

Sam's Alter Ego

At first glance Sam is not especially charismatic; he lacks the lofty words and the thundering metaphors. And yet, much of the future is hidden in what he says.

Because he is one of those people who leave you with the feeling that they know what they are doing. They say he was good at math from kindergarten, and at 8 he got his first computer. He quickly learned to take it apart and put it back together, then dove deep into the thickets of programming.

That “Mac,” as Sam calls it, soon became his closest friend and his lifeline from the world. Especially when adolescence arrived. “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the early years of the century was not the most awesome thing,” he recalls. “Finding chat rooms where you could talk to people who understood you was transformative.” At 16 he told his parents, and his mother was surprised, because she had always thought he was interested only in computers and completely indifferent to either sex.

Clearly he was brave from an early age. When a scandal flared up at his high school over a discussion of sexuality, he took the stage, declared openly that he was gay and asked rhetorically: “Do you want this school to be a repressive place, or one that is open to people who are different?” According to his teachers, the gesture proved revolutionary and made life much easier for the young people who later found themselves in the same situation.

A Lone Warrior

Technology remained his great passion, and he was admitted to study computer science at Stanford. After the first two years, however, he decided he needed no more schooling—it was time to roll up his sleeves and change the world…

With two fellow students he founded the startup Loopt. The year was 2005. Social networks were just rising over the horizon, and the young men thought it would be a good idea to build a mobile platform that shows you where your friends are and tells you when you are nearby. They managed to attract serious funding, but it turned out the idea could not gather enough users. Is it luck or not that it was Facebook, and not their idea, that became the everyday solution?

Either way, Sam was lucky after all. On the one hand, the startup ended in a sale that made him a millionaire; on the other, it was what brought him together with the people who would appreciate his skills and launch him into the highest orbit of Silicon Valley.

The Maya promised that 2012 would bring the end of the world. Well, it was not an especially pleasant time for our hero: at the same time as the sale of Loopt, he also split with his partner in business and in life, Nick Sivo, the only love of his life that ever reached the media.

Sam decided that his great talent was entrepreneurship and… it turned out that was exactly right. He set up a small investment fund, which nonetheless drew attention—the legendary Peter Thiel came in with $5 million, the investor who paved the way for almost all the giant ventures of Silicon Valley over the past two decades.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

By then Sam had also met Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. You have probably never heard of him, but ventures like Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe owe their rise to this startup accelerator. The company does not simply invest in projects it finds promising; it also supports them with a whole body of know-how, with guidance and proven solutions.

In 2014 this same Paul Graham decided to retire from his role at the top, because it turned out he had found the ideal replacement—our hero, Sam Altman. “Three minutes after I met him, I thought, ‘Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.’” Soon the list of potential successors was complete, and it contained a grand total of… one name.

At the time, the accelerator was working with companies worth more than $65 billion. The pace of growth was incredible—every year it supported more than 1,000 new startups in all kinds of fields. At the new leader's insistence, many of them were high-tech and science-based, even outside information technology.

Sam did a wonderful job; the projects he took on achieved impressive successes and piled up investment. At one point he even had to take the helm of Reddit for 8 days to quickly put things in order.

Uncle Sam

So, are you surprised that we are getting close to the present and haven't mentioned artificial intelligence anywhere so far? Even though this is the man who, more than anyone, is paving the way for it in its modern form… Well, here we come to the fascinating story of OpenAI.

Why “open,” of all things? The company was founded in 2015 by 5 investors and 3 organizations, and quickly raised more than a billion dollars for development. Its idea was to counter Google's ventures in artificial intelligence at the time. As the founders put it, there was a danger that an extremely important new technology would become a monopoly of the big companies, with no clarity about regulation. Without knowing whether the rise of AI might turn out to be our last mistake as a species. The project set itself against this, with the aim of developing technologies open to everyone, with an eye on ethics and with tighter control over the capabilities we delegate to algorithms. What an irony of fate that less than a decade later the roles would be sharply reversed…

Speaking of the investors, among them stand out the names of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and… Sam Altman.

Papa Geppetto

A few years later Sam had already taken control of the company. In 2019 he left Y Combinator to concentrate on running OpenAI. Soon after, the first big successes we have mentioned began to appear. It was Altman who made the hotly contested decision to let ChatGPT talk to anyone who wanted. This brought him a lot of criticism from professional circles, but won his company an enormous advantage. ChatGPT swept up public interest, drew every gaze and became a synonym for artificial intelligence. And all of this from a company with only… 375 employees! Gradually, though, the venture drifted completely away from the ideas of open access and open source, becoming ever more commercial. The partnership with Microsoft, which will gradually integrate the AI projects into almost all of its products, is growing ever more serious too. This even prompted Musk to write that the project had strayed from its idea and that things were not going well. Where will all of this turn next?

One Hundred Years of Solitude

In search of answers, it is only right to give the floor, of course, to our hero. He does not like media appearances at all, and it will be interesting to see whether that changes in his new, inevitable role as a global celebrity. Still, Sam gave a rather curious interview to Forbes at the end of February.

The entrepreneur is convinced that we are already on the road to creating artificial general intelligence—an algorithm able to solve different types of tasks no worse than a human. “I think there's a real chance we've truly uncovered something important here and that this paradigm will take us very, very far,” he says. But it will not happen soon. One of the conclusions he has drawn in recent years is that the transition will be gradual; it will not happen all at once, with one particular project.

The Robot vs. Capitalism

He is frank that artificial general intelligence is the thing driving all his actions forward. “Some are more direct, others don't look that way, but they actually are. And then there's also the goal of getting to a world of abundance.”

At the same time, Sam says, this step will bring a very serious change to all our lives.

“I think capitalism is great. I love capitalism,” the multimillionaire admits. “Of all the bad systems we've found so far, it's the best one—or the least bad. I hope we find a much better one. But if AGI arrives in its full form, I can imagine all the ways it will break capitalism.”

Sam answers the criticism that he released a technology not yet proven safe too early like this: “I really believe society needs to feel this, to wrestle with it, to see the benefits and understand the downsides. So I think the most important thing we have to do is put these things out there, so the world can start to understand what's coming.” “We need time to figure out exactly what to do,” Sam says. “Regulation is necessary, but it will take time. Although the tools of this generation aren't very dangerous, I think we're not far from creating potentially frightening AI technologies.”

Afraid of Bears, Stay Out of the Woods

And so the long-awaited successor to the most successful algorithm has arrived: weeks ago GPT-4 was unveiled, once again significantly improving on the previous versions. And that was the occasion for Sam to give another important interview, this time to CNBC, in which he added that he is “a little bit scared” of what is happening in the AI world.

Well, what he means is his worry that authoritarian regimes might develop this kind of technology, which would be dangerous… In other words, it is perfectly safe if giant companies do it. He says he worries that such models could be used for hacking attacks and for disinformation. Those are certainly serious risks, but no smaller are the ones that come from the future decisions of our hero, whose story is not yet fully told.

Only One Future

What lies ahead? What will the next algorithms created by Sam and his colleagues be capable of? Exciting news is certainly on its way, and the development of the whole field of artificial intelligence depends on it.

Meanwhile, Sam does not keep away from other technological directions that herald big news either. In 2020 he created Worldcoin—a concept for new digital money that could be used through a unique “fingerprint”: the iris of the eye, which sets every earthling apart. The project has not managed much success because of regulatory difficulties in many countries… but who knows, after the onset of the blockchain winter, ideas like this may be reborn—the world visibly needs a new generation of payments.

Sam has long said that “science is broken,” so he tries to help companies in energy, biotechnology and robotics.

During the pandemic Sam gave serious money to the development of COVID vaccines. Science remains an important part of his interests as an investor. Not long ago it emerged that Altman had invested $180 million in the startup Retro Biosciences, which promises to extend our lives by at least 10 years in the foreseeable future. It is also a record: never before has a single investor put so much into a venture of this kind. He set aside $375 million for Helion Energy, a company pursuing the long-awaited cold fusion and the energy solution that would give us an endless and at the same time completely green source of energy.

In recent months he has drawn many eyes both with OpenAI's newest AI models and with… the scandal in which he was briefly ousted from the company. Then he returned with a bang, stronger than ever.

Only Forward

And still, what kind of person is Sam? In 2016 a blogger asked him whether life is better with Asperger's syndrome or whether it gets in his way. It is a diagnosis on the autism spectrum in which people have serious difficulties communicating with others. He did not answer… “Damn it, but I don't have Asperger's! Then I thought about it, and I understood why he'd think so. I seem strange in a lot of ways. I have broad interests in technology, and I'm not drawn to what most people like—parties, meeting lots of people. When someone looks at a photo and says, ‘Oh, I sense this and that,’ all those hidden emotions, I sit there looking at them like an alien.”

His great skill is a clear vision and an intuitive understanding of complex systems. By all appearances, though, empathy is not one of his strong suits.

“Our phones already control us,” Sam believes. “The merging of humans and technology has already begun. And merging is the best option. Any other scenario, in which we don't merge with technology but develop in parallel, ends in conflict. Either we enslave them, or they enslave us.”

In his free time he likes to drive his 5 fast cars; two of them are McLarens, a third is “an old Tesla” (what could “old” possibly mean?). His other hobby is flying rented planes over California. And the third, as Sam puts it, is preparing to survive. His acquaintances often talk about apocalyptic scenarios involving viruses, wars or… lethal AI. He does not think it will come to that soon, but… just in case, he has prepared a bunker with guns, gold, iodine, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks from the Israeli special forces.

As Peter Thiel says, “Sam is not at all religious, but culturally he's a typical Jew—an optimist, but ready to survive. With the feeling that things can always go wrong and that there is no place in the world where you can truly feel at home.”

Do It Yourself

Every year he writes a list of goals; some are about business, others about physical activity, such as cycling 100 miles every week. They say it is rare for any of the tasks he sets himself to go undone.

Before the last election, one of his two brothers half-jokingly suggested he run for president of the United States. “Who could be better than you, Sam?” And he replied: “Oh, sure! Let's send the gay Jew to fix things. That'll definitely work…”

It is nice that he has a sense of humor, but… don't reveal what you have read here to conspiracy lovers. If you decide to anyway, tell them too that he has been a vegetarian since he was a kid.

Whether he eats steaks, whether he is an emotional man—I don't think that matters much. But it is worth hoping for Sam Altman's common sense over the coming years, when he will be painting the future. The future in which every one of us, without exception, will live…

Jason Citron knows all too well what it means to fail. He has done it many times, spectacularly, losing serious money. That was before he created Discord, the next-generation social network that long ago outgrew the world of gaming and became a convenient and secure means of communication, free of many of the flaws of traditional platforms.

But how did the programmer come to turn down an offer of… 10 billion dollars from Microsoft?! What failures did Jason go through before reaching his enormous success? What are the most important things he has to tell us, and the key lessons of his fascinating story?

He Who Plays Wins

Do what you love and things will work out beautifully for you, goes the popular cliché. Well, Jason has loved computer games since he was little; they are the thing that has thrilled him his whole life. Even on his first date with his wife, instead of indulging in more classic romance, the two of them threw themselves into an arcade game marathon. Since they are still together to this day, the idea apparently turned out to be a good one.

The other thing he has loved since childhood is programming. He is still in single digits when he discovers how interesting it is to tell a computer what to do. He learns fast—so fast that while still in elementary school he asks his dad: “How can I get money from a stranger online?” At first his parents wonder whether he is selling some forbidden substances, especially when it becomes clear what sums the kid expects to receive. But then they realize he is building websites as a freelancer, and they help him open a bank account.

Quite early on, his two hobbies—programming and games—come together. He is destined to spend a couple of decades making games that never manage to attract much attention before he achieves his first big success. And then comes his huge breakthrough, and not with a game at all…

Never Had Enough of Playing

Unlike many who have made it in Silicon Valley, our hero never so much as gets a whiff of the atmosphere of the great universities. He studies in Florida, at a private school of game design, and hurries to get to the practical side.

“Higher education is an interesting part of society,” says Jason. “When I work with people, it never comes up who graduated from what; the only thing that matters is how you do your job. The beauty of Silicon Valley is that if you have a great idea and can make it real, there is a way to convince even a complete stranger to give you money and join your project.”

As I mentioned, his first attempts are far from impressive. Take the idea of creating a dating site based on video calls. He and his colleagues find the funding, put in a good deal of time, and when the pilot is ready… for several weeks not a single user signs up.

His next venture is a little more successful. He creates an online game in which players communicate with each other while playing. He uses one of the grandfathers of today's social networks—Bebo, which exists only in North America.

Game of Thrones

But he has never shied away from risky decisions. He decides to shut the project down on the very day Steve Jobs announces the creation of the Apple App Store. Because he senses that very soon everyone will start playing on their phones. And the moment to turn to mobile games is crucial; he has to make the call right away to catch the wave that is only just beginning to rise.

The decision proves more than farsighted: after five months of hard work, Jason and his team release the game Aurora Feint.

The success exceeds even his wildest expectations. Clearly people really are rushing to look for cool apps on the new mobile platform, and there still aren't enough of them. The programmer hopes his game will draw 1,000 people in a week, and the goal is met within the first hour.

The Rules of the Game

And yet the venture turns out to be successful, but not profitable: despite the great interest, the team never finds a way to raise more money to develop the game.

So Jason decides to change the model. Both his father and his grandfather are entrepreneurs, and he says he learned the most important lesson from them—don't give up, always look for the different angle that can change the situation. And this time he finds it.

He decides that instead of games he will sell the technology the games are built on. Jason has noticed that while working on their project, the programmers made something more—a platform for communication, leaderboards, the ability for many people to play together over a network at the same time. If this whole foundation were offered to other teams, they would be spared the tedious part of the work and serious investment, while Jason and his colleagues would profit from their experience, from something they had already built.

And sure enough, many teams quickly get in touch with them; within a few weeks, 15 projects are already running on their platform. Soon the company's logo—OpenFeint—appears in almost all of the most popular games. Then comes the time to part ways. In April 2011, OpenFeint is sold to the Japanese gaming company GREE for $104 million.

Back in the Game

For a while Jason works for the new owners, but he soon realizes that they have different views on how the venture should develop. Richer, but back at square one. Determined to create something truly big.

It is curious how much his story resembles that of Slack's creator, Stewart Butterfield. Both start out in games before realizing that the thing they are best at is something they created almost by accident, along the way.

Their two big successes are alike, too. In recent years, especially against the backdrop of the pandemic, Slack has established itself as the convenient communication platform for the professional world. Discord, meanwhile, has become the right solution for the same needs, but outside work—in an informal setting, in discussions in the spirit of the old internet forums. The platform has even found itself in the unexpected role of one of the contenders to become the next generation of social network.

Discord has long ceased to be a place for gamers alone. And yet it began with, and because of, the games its creator loves so much.

The Game of Games

In the years before Discord, gamers came together mostly around technology platforms, such as consoles like the PlayStation or Xbox. Jason, however, judges that what is missing is a more convenient, shared platform through which they can talk, discuss games and coordinate.

Once again he starts with the idea of making a game in which users will communicate in real time—by chat, audio and video. Alongside it, a communication network would be built that could become a convenient place for showcasing future games, and for advertising too. But this time he has misjudged things—he has decided that tablets will become the next favorite way to play, and they never manage to catch on as a mass solution.

Two years later the game is launched, but it doesn't enjoy much success. And once again Jason decides to abandon it and, in its place, create something completely different… which at the same time is also almost ready.

A Big Player

The game's communication platform suddenly breaks away from it to live a life of its own under the charming name Discord.

As Jason admits, the idea isn't his but that of co-founder Stan Vishnevskiy, who at the time is also working on the new game. In his view, the time has come for a communication platform that isn't tied to a single game or technology. The entrepreneur agrees wholeheartedly, and this is where the big success comes in.

Jason judges by his own experience—all his life, computer games have been a way for him to connect with people, from his best friends to his own wife. So maybe they are the foundation that simply helps people communicate? To carry on from there, growing closer, discussing more and more things in life?

“So many of my fondest memories are connected with games. That's why my whole career has been dedicated to giving other people the chance to create special moments in their lives,” he says.

A Hungry Bear Won't Dance

The first 50 users arrive after a post on Reddit; then interest grows at breakneck speed.

In its early versions Discord is extremely unstable, constantly freezing, but users don't give up. They have evidently found a platform where they feel at home. And it pays them back: over the following months the engineers work hard, and Discord begins to stand out for its stability compared with all the others.

Gradually, instead of a “chat for gamers,” the platform starts presenting itself as “a new way to chat with your friends and with people who share your interests.”

What helps it fit into the new times and quickly move beyond the world of gaming is its decentralization. People gather in what amount to separate platforms, called servers, based on shared interests, topics or their favorite games. The communication takes us back to the dawn of the online boom, with the magic of finding common interests with a stranger from the other side of the world. And on the other hand, it offers protection from hate: the individual servers moderate themselves, and when the community decides that someone is misbehaving, it takes action.

Ornaments on the Tree

Which, of course, creates the next “generation” of problems—the platform makes it easy for people united by extreme interests to gather, and the voice of the majority can very quickly turn into the law of the jungle. Into something that makes even Lord of the Flies pale in comparison. And yet Jason and his colleagues seem to be finding solutions: despite the decentralization, there are also forms of central control for when things don't appear to be going by the rules.

Jason admits he didn't expect quite so much interest. He says Discord's success is at once “surprising, amazing, but also very humbling.”

Then, as we all know, came the pandemic, and we shut ourselves up in our homes. It was in March 2021 that Microsoft offered a mind-boggling 10 billion dollars to buy Discord. And our hero boldly said no, because… he could afford to. Disappointed by his previous sale, when his venture went down a path he didn't like, he made the brave move. Believing that one day his platform would be worth much, much more.

“I discussed it with the rest of the team too, whether this was the path we might take… And it was wonderful—most people told me they wanted us to keep building together what we had started,” says the programmer.

Beating the Game

Jason has seen it all in his colorful career. “The road of building a company is full of highs and lows,” he says. “It's easy to talk about the peaks; it's always harder when it comes to the low points. But that's where you learn much more.”

Today Discord has more than 150 million active users every month, a number that has tripled in just three years. The platform mostly attracts young people with all sorts of interests. About 700 people work on it today, a headcount that has also doubled in less than two years.

Fortune favors the bold. And computer games sometimes resemble life quite a lot—they can teach you a thing or two. If you don't believe me, ask Jason Citron…

Bearing the name of a mythical knight, he is one of the few Don Quixotes still fighting the monster that today’s internet has become.

“The closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”—that is how Tristan Harris is known. His name made headlines with the notorious film The Social Dilemma, which drew plenty of attention but never led to much real change. His work embodies everything that is “broken” in today’s online life. The manipulative practices that have become a threat to our future as a species.

Tristan Harris is not only the most recognizable champion of a free and democratic internet. Not only a thorough researcher who draws attention to the ways we are manipulated. He is also the man who warned a decade ago that the path technology was taking would lead us into a world of mammoth companies more powerful than the largest states. Into a time when we can no longer hold our attention while reading. Into filter bubbles that grotesquely distort the way we get our information.

Does he think we can reverse these trends? Can the internet become a free place without monopolies, where information is delivered democratically, with respect for the personal data and views of every user… What are his ideas for the future of the web?

Between Three Camps

He comes as a natural continuation of Jaron Lanier, Eli Pariser and Cal Newport. Tristan’s path runs through a successful startup of his own and an attempt to change the system from the inside as part of Google’s team. Then comes his real battle—for the time and attention of all of us.

Born in 1985, he started out like many other remarkable figures of Silicon Valley. He fell for programming early, writing his first programs for the Mac as a very young kid. His idol back then was Steve Wozniak; he even sent him letters, which went unanswered.

Besides computers, he was also fascinated by the art of illusionists. He taught himself magic tricks to impress his friends. Later he would return to those days, because they made him think about asymmetric power. When a magician asks you to pick a card from the deck, he seems to give you a choice, but it is only an illusion: he knows in advance which one you will pick, because he has skillfully steered you toward it. Which is exactly what, years later, Tristan would notice the internet giants doing too.

In Shining Armor

As a young man he was definitely on their side. He studied at Stanford, the university that, statistically, has given the world the most successful startups.

One of his classmates was Mike Krieger, the future co-founder of Instagram, and together they took part in a behavioral experiment. They studied how to get a person in a given network to send someone a photo when the weather was bad where that other person was—to cheer them up. The course was in psychology and focused on how to influence users. Our hero was struck by the fact that not a word was said about how that influence could happen ethically, or how to leave those same users the freedom to choose.

While still a student, he fulfilled one of his big dreams: an internship at Apple. Then came the big step—he founded his own startup. Apture was a browser add-on that helped people look up more information on a given site. The app quickly became popular, used by The Economist, the Financial Times and The New York Times. As Harris later recounted, the whole time he was torn between the company’s mission—to spark people’s curiosity—and pressure from clients to keep visitors on their sites for as long as possible.

The startup was bought by Google for $10 million, and Tristan joined the company along with it, working on Gmail. After a year at it, he was convinced he did not want to be part of a manipulative system, and he began his crusade…

Tristan and Isolde

That is the name of one of the most popular medieval tales, dating back to the 12th century and influencing many later literary works. It exists in many versions, spread across all the civilizations of the world at the time. But on the whole it is always about all-consuming love and a brave knight who fights for justice.

Truth be told, we know nothing about the all-consuming loves in Harris’s life; he deliberately keeps any personal information hidden. A kind of symbol of how technology ought to respect private space. But quite a lot is known about the medieval hero’s namesake and his fight for justice, and that is exactly why we are talking about him.

In 2012 he sent his colleagues a 144-page presentation titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.” He emailed it to about a dozen people, but within a few days more than 5,000 Google employees had read it, including Larry Page.

The giant supposedly gave him a chance to put his ideas into practice. A year later Tristan took the position of “design ethicist and product philosopher” at the giant company. You know how this industry loves grand, original job titles with rather vague content. Either way, he tried to promote his ideas, even inviting the world-famous Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh to give a lecture to the “collective.”

How the Steel Was Tempered

He met with Google’s bosses many times. He got applause, they supposedly told him how important his work was, but… nothing changed. So in December 2015 Tristan gave up trying to change the system from the inside, quit his job and devoted himself to his mission. To talk about the flaws of modern technology and how we can counter them—again, through technology.

It is perfectly understandable why Google could not afford to apply our hero’s ideas. In the wild online world, that would instantly make them uncompetitive against everyone else.

This is the same asymmetric power, the lesson Tristan carries with him from his magical childhood. Only in this case it is not an illusionist’s harmless attempt to impress, but outright manipulation. “The people ‘behind the screen’ hold all the power over those who look at that very screen.”

“Our problem is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology,” says Tristan.

At the Tip of the Spear

All of this is a natural consequence of the most important feature of the modern digital world: the vast sea of information flooding us, and the battle for our attention. Like it or not, to survive, companies do everything they can to turn our gaze toward their product, as often and for as long as possible, because that is what, one way or another, feeds them.

Tristan calls it the “attention economy.” Every app and website—whether for meditation, a news platform or an addictive game—tries to catch your eye so that you open it and spend as much time in it as possible.

And how does that happen? Through all kinds of manipulative techniques. In his email to colleagues, Tristan warned that within a decade these would leave people unable to hold their attention for long, for instance while reading a book. That software products would increasingly bombard us with notifications about anything and everything, and we would react again and again without realizing it, like a hamster on a wheel. That personalized content carries risks that need to be understood and prevented.

Scoundrels, Sir!

Welcome to that future, about which Tristan turned out to be entirely right. Distractions in our daily lives today are a scourge whose rotten fruit we will be eating for years to come. It is getting harder and harder to hold our attention, to stop ourselves from glancing at the phone again to see whether someone has liked our latest post.

But even if they have, so what?

After Google, Tristan took up something he calls “ethical activism.” He created the Time Well Spent movement to get people talking about the issue and to make them aware of the scale of the manipulation. Then, with like-minded people, he founded the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology.

In 2020 he managed to draw attention to these issues by appearing in The Social Dilemma. The film was seen by 100 million people in 190 countries and translated into 30 languages! Harris became quite famous, many countries invited him to consult on possible regulation, and he became a frequent guest in the U.S. Senate.

Yes, the film’s popularity probably led to some changes, such as the introduction of Focus mode on new iPhones. The truth, however, is that the old saying has played out once again: the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

In King Arthur’s Court

According to our hero, one solution is to put an end to free apps. As good old Jaron Lanier keeps repeating, when something is free, you are the product—and the sad examples of the internet giants prove it today. Their fierce battle for our data and our time proves it. Against this, Tristan says, stand “organic technologies”: you pay for them, but that allows their makers to avoid manipulation and advertising tricks.

The first step, in his view, is for states to ban hyper-targeted advertising.

But it is very hard to get used to paying for something you have always received (seemingly) for free. Of course, there is a price here, and in the end it turns out steep, but to realize it you have to stop and think… which you have no time for while the phone in your pocket reminds you yet again that someone on one of your 235 social networks has liked your post.

And here comes Tristan’s next idea, which is simple and logical, and if more people adopted it, they would only gain. Yes, you know whose hands the rescue of the drowning lies in.

The search for a solution to these problems begins with awareness—few people will stop to think and not discover that they have turned into “anonymous Facebookaholics,” opening one platform or another minute after minute.

Excalibur Online

Our hero’s advice is quite similar to that of Cal Newport and his “digital minimalism.” The steps are truly intuitive. Cut down for a while on the apps on your phone, to work out which of them really matter to you. It is a fact that today it is nearly impossible to be an active member of society if you give them up completely—something made even more true by the increasingly flexible work arrangements since the pandemic.

But salvation lies in limiting ourselves to the apps, and the notifications within them, that truly matter. If we really cannot wait to see an email from someone important, we can always set a filter so the phone alerts us only about that, and not about every new piece of spam in the inbox. On average, each of us today checks our phone around 150 times a day!

Among his other ideas is to keep the important apps on a single screen, so that the rest are not constantly in front of your eyes. Because they are all designed so that the moment you look at the screen, they lure you with a red exclamation mark saying there is something new and especially interesting to open them for.

A Matter of Honor

The inability to concentrate is a huge and deepening problem—you can see it in how the character of each new trending social network changes. But there is another big topic tied to the ethics of the giants that Tristan often talks about, and it is no less important for us as a species: democracy and the development of society.

Here, too, social networks matter a great deal. Today, if this very article has reached you, it has very likely done so through one of the internet giants. Long gone are the days when we visited websites to read the news—now it is served to us by search engines, if we need something specific, or by social networks. The latter, however, are not at all fond of showing external links; their main goal is to hold our attention as long as possible. As a result, content creators have to pay for ads so that their words reach anyone at all.

Or the other option: to be loud, provocative, conspiratorial, ambiguous, “begging” you to click on the flashy-sounding link. From all this, logically, came other phenomena Tristan predicted—the polarization of societies, the impossibility of reaching agreement, aggressive communication.

Windmills

Along with this comes direct interference. According to research by psychologist Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, for example, since 2015 Google’s results have shifted the outcome of elections in no fewer than 25 countries.

“All of this leads to the downgrading of people, of humanity—the downgrading of relationships, attention, democracy, of our sense of shame,” says Tristan.

The advance of artificial intelligence opens up new topics. According to the modern knight, the problem there is not that technology will begin to surpass us technically in our strong areas. The danger comes when the computer “realizes” human weaknesses, when it understands where a person is emotionally vulnerable and uses that against them. Aren’t we already seeing the first traces of this problem in social media algorithms?

The Last Argument

At a Senate hearing in the spring of 2021, Tristan put the problem clearly and compellingly: “We are in the middle of the great transition from 20th-century analog society to 21st-century digital society. We face two choices that both look like dystopias: we can head toward the Chinese Orwellian brain implants, with authoritarian control, censorship and mass behavior modification. Or we can choose the American, Western Huxleyan version, where we sink into distraction, outrage, triviality and amusing ourselves to death… Let’s try to find a third way: toward an open, not a closed, digital society!”

And indeed, let’s! This battle is so important, and it depends on each of us… A meaningful digital future surely passes through reflection. And through a fight—but not against people who hold different opinions online. You do remember where freedom lies, Sancho…?

A slightly dry young man in a thin tie and an impeccable suit sits behind the microphone, and across from him, one after another, come people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Kanye West, Vitalik Buterin, Noam Chomsky, Jaron Lanier, as well as leading scientists from the world of artificial intelligence, with whom he speaks the same language.

Lex Fridman has been one of the most popular podcasters of the past year, even though by profession he is a scientist, an artificial intelligence researcher and a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Born and raised in Moscow, of Jewish-Ukrainian descent, today he says he is American and speaks English without an accent. That does not stop him from blaming his new homeland for all the wars it wages around the world, just as he blames his old one.

Lex is more than an interesting bird because of his successes as a scientist and a podcaster (some would say a journalist). Here is what else is worth learning from his very curious story.

Iron man

“The most realistic conversation between two robots,” reads the most-liked comment under Elon Musk’s latest appearance on Lex Fridman’s show. And indeed, with the typical manner of engineers, the two talk in an even tone, the host spruced up in his classic suit, the kind you mostly see in Sofia on the young men handing out Mormon literature.

And yet, as the robots chat away, Elon recounts that although he is not religious, he went down on his knees and prayed for SpaceX’s first crewed mission to get people safely to the International Space Station.

Interestingly, not long ago Musk promised that it would be on Lex’s show that he would fully explain his view on Twitter, after the notorious poll decided he should step down from running it. (Musk later sent his brother Kimbal instead, but the turmoil easily explains why.) And Lex complained that right after that, attacks began against him too—such as people doctoring the information about his biography on Wikipedia.

Lex is not a journalist, but he manages to put his guests at ease and let them talk. His other impressive skill is presenting subjects like artificial intelligence, complex and full of specialized knowledge, to specialists, while telling them in a way that is both scientifically sound and accessible.

He may not have the enormous popularity of his colleague and friend Joe Rogan, with whom he often trades guest appearances, but he does something very important—he shows that in the world of digital content there is room for popular science, for intelligent conversation.

Judged by the Suit

How come he is called Lex if he comes from the Slavic world? Well, yes, his name is of course Alexander, and he was born in 1983 in the tiny Russian town of Chkalovsk.

Alexander Friedmann—heard that name before? Yes, that is the name of one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. In the 1920s he came up with the theory of the expanding universe, later confirmed by Hubble, who got considerably more of the glory.

The elder Friedmann fought in the First World War, and after the Russian Revolution ran an aircraft factory. He died of typhus during his honeymoon.

The name really is common: Alexander Fridman is also the name of Lex’s father, likewise a leading scientist, only in the field of plasma physics. Whether he has anything to do with the researcher of a century ago, or it is simply a coincidence of names, has never come up.

What is more than curious, though, is the podcast episode in which father and son Fridman talk about theoretical physics, about Chernobyl, about the life of an émigré. The distinguished physicist even looks like Einstein, and unlike his son he speaks with a heavy Russian accent, often switching to his native language when he cannot find the thread of his thought.

Every time he gets excited, he pours himself a glass from the bottle in front of him and takes a sip… yes, it is water in this case, they are scientists, after all.

How the Steel Was Tempered

In the same episode Lex talks about coming to America and how it seemed like a terrible idea to him. Although he arrived at just 13, in Russia he had been surrounded by kids who shared his interests—physics, mathematics—while across the ocean he landed in an ordinary school.

As his father replies, it also matters that they are Jewish by origin. Throughout its entire history, this people has grown used to dealing with such things, to moving, to surviving. And he quotes, in Russian, lines from a song by Vysotsky: “when they go to their death, they sing. The most terrible hour in battle is the one when you are waiting for the attack.”

They also discuss Lex’s grandfather, who fought in the Second World War as a sniper in the lands of today’s Ukraine.

The father is a world-class scientist in his field, and the podcaster also has a brother, Greg, who heads a startup that, as it happens, also works on plasma physics.

Interestingly, this landmark episode, which was number 100 exactly on Lex’s list, is now missing from his official channel and can only be found through other sources. It is not hard to guess that the reasons lie in the international situation.

In November 2021, news emerged that talks were under way for Vladimir Putin to appear on his podcast, which Lex announced himself, but it was later denied at the highest level. When Musk weighed in on the topic of the day with a proposal for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, Lex said he would be glad to take on the role of mediator.

“Don’t try to run away from history, learn from it,” the podcaster urges. “Those who crave power for power’s sake rely on chaos, on anger, on fear. Don’t give them a chance. Be kind. Be patient. Be strong.”

Dura lex, sed lex

Which is Latin for “the law is harsh, but it is the law.”

Lex holds a PhD in software engineering. His first job was at Google, but he stayed only half a year, working on new methods of user authentication. He decided he missed the university and moved to MIT, where, besides teaching, he does research in autonomous vehicles, machine learning and robotics. He has a fair number of publications in serious scientific journals.

How did he decide to start the podcast? For more than 10 years he has been a big fan of Joe Rogan, listening to him from the very beginning. It was Rogan who inspired him to start, and to focus specifically on artificial intelligence.

Later they became friends. A curious recent episode is connected with that. During Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest appearance on his show, Rogan did his best to convince him how cool Lex is and that it was time he went on Lex’s show too, but Tyson brushed off the invitation, who knows why, visibly showing only lukewarm interest.

Today his channel has gathered around 3 million subscribers and 300 million views, which is far from the records but still impressive for a project devoted mainly to technology… Lex has had a YouTube channel since 2006. In its current form the venture has existed since 2018; at first it was called the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, and later it took its creator’s name. Its purpose: to discuss “AI, science, technology, history, philosophy and the nature of intelligence, consciousness, love, and power.”

His guests have included scientists such as Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun, James Gosling—the creator of the Java programming language—and the chess players Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen.

A Spark of Life

Yes, Lex is a man of science… and yet, a month ago many more people with no interest in the subject heard of him, thanks to the appearance of the rapper Kanye West. Shortly before that, Kanye had announced that he was getting ready to try his luck once again in the race for president of the United States.

Well, they waded so deep into a discussion of the Holocaust that afterward a whole bunch of huge sponsors terminated their contracts with the rapper.

The conversation was genuinely emotional, especially for Lex, who has ancestors who lost their lives in the Holocaust. The interview became really quite popular.

“We are still in the Holocaust. Six million people died in it, 20 million are the victims of abortion,” says Kanye, who now goes by Ye and has evidently turned toward ultraconservative American voters. “The media promote ‘my body, my choice,’ and what this is about is promoting a new Holocaust. Fifty percent of Black deaths in America are from abortion. The most dangerous place for Black people in America is their mother’s womb,” Ye rambles on. And he repeats over and over that the media around the world are Jewish and that they set the agenda.

“Jewish media is a tautology,” says Ye, and Lex replies that this sounds like the words of Goebbels.

Ye. “No, no,” you can tell the host wants to tell him, but the guest carries on in the same vein, and Lex, sitting across from him, is left speechless. But he keeps the conversation going, engages in conversation, in discussion.

The Struggle Is Merciless and Cruel

This, in my view, is precisely the big lesson worth taking from the podcaster in our part of the world. That it is always worth continuing to seek out the other opinion, not giving up on the conversation, not digging in inside your filter bubble. “Given my family history, the conversation was difficult, but important,” Lex wrote afterward. “Because I believe in the value of deep, honest and empathetic conversation between different points of view.”

In this context, it is curious to note that our protagonist is into fitness, and another sport too. These days, it seems almost impossible to make it in the world of podcasts unless you are a master of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Both Lex and his friend Joe Rogan hold high belts in the fashionable martial art, and the same goes for our part of the world—one of the most successful podcasters, “the superhuman” Georgi Nenov. Perhaps it is also because I cannot fold people’s kimonos while they are still in them that I do not dare to start a podcast version of Digital Stories.

Besides holding a black belt in this sport, Lex also practices judo and wrestling and takes part in competitions.

So, from this point of view, the suited host’s experience clearly proves useful. Because it is clear that combat sports, much more than meets the eye, teach you to respect your opponent.

His favorite book is Camus’s The Plague. He also loves music and plays guitar and piano, but his guests are rarely musicians—with the exception of Ye, insofar as he is a musician at all.

Never to Grow Up

“Life gets more fun if you manage to keep your spontaneity,” says Lex.

He usually records his podcasts on weekends, when he is not at work and his guests are free. One of the questions he asks most often is what advice they would give to young people. “Surround yourself with the right people!” declares Mark Zuckerberg, who says he has always focused on choosing employees and on the human side. Well, let us take his word for it.

The message of Lex’s beloved Elon Musk: “Be useful to society.” He advises the young to learn a little about many fields, to meet all kinds of people, to read lots of books and to seriously develop their general knowledge.

Yann LeCun recommends that they take an interest in the big questions, such as what the universe is and what time is, while Joe Rogan tells them to find for themselves whatever excites them.

Lex says he is just a kid in a suit who loves to talk about love and robots. “Being an adult is overrated. I refuse to grow up,” the scientist adds. Well, he is a Soviet kid; he must have read about the adventures of Pippi Longstocking.

Lex’s great strength, besides seeking out the differing opinion, is painting the future. Presenting technology, with its incredible possibilities, in accessible language that at the same time stays true to the science.

Presenting the themes of the digital present and the exciting future, just as this site tries to do. Because the important questions about us as a species have long been here, and they hide many interesting answers…

In 2003, 19-year-old Matt Mullenweg found out firsthand that necessity is the mother of invention. He was using a free blogging platform and needed a little help, but there was no one to give it. The result, born on April 1 and no joke at all, was WordPress, the open-source platform thanks to which anyone today can build a good-looking site with minimal effort and carve out their own little corner of the web.

According to the statistics, WordPress today carries on its shoulders… a third of the world's websites! (Digital Stories is one of them.) But what does jazz have to do with any of it? This story from two decades ago is as meaningful as it is full of colorful details. It's time I told you about Matt and his brainchild, which grew up to become a giant loved by millions.

What a Wonderful World

Very few things in the internet's past have been as positive, or done it as much good, as the birth of WordPress. For the first time, an open-source platform appeared around which an enormous community came together. Thanks to that, it is easier than ever today to have a well-made site without being a programmer or a designer, and without needing serious experience.

It's very hard to grasp what a third of today's internet actually means. Different sources will give you different figures, but it comes to roughly 450 million web pages! Just picture them lined up side by side. Both their number and their share keep growing: WordPress adds about 2 percent to its “share” of the web every year, and according to some sources it has already passed 40 percent!

The platform is constantly evolving and improving, and the ecosystem grows by the hour. Today the project's core codebase holds 423,759 lines of code, and since the programmers work on a volunteer basis, the hours put into it so far add up to 112 years of work.

And all of this, like most of the projects that changed our lives in the digital age, started completely by accident, out of one kid's curiosity.

Hit the Road Jack

Matthew Charles Mullenweg, born on January 11, 1984, is an unusual bird. Programming became his main calling, but he is anything but the typical image of someone buried in computers. He's into cooking, photography, writing and good music. At school he specialized in saxophone, and his university studies were in… political science.

His father was a software specialist, but for many years the boy had no interest whatsoever in the field. It only caught his attention as he was nearing 20, and even then because of the venture that would later make him world-famous.

In 2003, 19-year-old Matt was a freshman at the University of Houston. He decided to start a blog and chose a not-so-popular platform called b2/cafelog. Matt wanted to show his fellow students the photos he had taken on a trip to Washington. The blog was called Photomatt.net, and later it became simply Ma.tt (the site is still alive today here).

To give you a sense of scale, at the time only 2,000 blogs had been built with b2/cafelog. The platform was far from perfect, so Matt needed a few small, specific improvements to be able to upload his photos. He tried to get in touch with the people who had created the project… And today all of us who use WordPress are enormously lucky that he hit a brick wall.

On The Sunny Side of the Street

The platform's creator had simply vanished, so Matt decided to ask for advice on one of the popular programming forums of the day. “The Blogging Software Dilemma,” the young man titled his post, and explained: “The software I use on my blog hasn't been updated in months, and the main developer has disappeared. I can't find him anywhere, but I hope he's okay.” Days passed, and only one comment appeared below. A certain Mike Little wrote: “If you're serious about forking b2, I would be interested in contributing.”

Matt didn't think twice. He brought Mike on board, and the two started their own venture based on b2. They split it off as an unnamed fork—from the English word for the eating utensil, which in “software speak” refers to a version of a given program (most often open-source) that “breaks off” and goes its own way.

Symbolic or not, the fork was officially created on April Fools' Day itself, and that date became WordPress's birthday.

The pilot version, numbered 0.7, was ready as early as May of that year. Matt and Mike's project, which let the young man build the blog he wanted, worked. And although it didn't even have a name yet, the two were already fired up about it and decided to keep going, to build a complete blogging system. Gradually more people got in touch, and Matt and Mike were spurred on even further. The snowflake turned into an avalanche, and within a few years WordPress became synonymous with a platform that lets you easily create a site, whether you want an online store, a personal blog or a promotional page.

Fly Me to the Moon

People keep choosing WordPress to this day because in its basic form you don't even need to know how to program. The system is easy, intuitive and time-tested. And if you can program even a little, you can develop your project further without limits. Of course, there are no perfect solutions, and WordPress isn't always the best choice. But the belief that it's only suitable for modest projects is definitely a myth: BBC America, Bloomberg Professional, TechCrunch and The New Yorker use it to this day.

The project's godmother was Matt's friend Christine Tremoulet, a copywriter who had come up with the names of quite a few successful brands. He asked her for advice, and two days later the brand that now rules the internet suddenly came to her. Christine checked online, saw that there was no site by that name yet, and called her friend, saying a single word over the phone: WordPress.

Christine also helped with the early promotion on social media. Like everyone else on the project, she refused to take money for her help, because that is the whole idea behind open-source projects. To this day WP holds fast to its four freedoms: anyone can use the platform for any purpose; study how it works and change it to do whatever they wish; pass it on; and give others versions of the platform they have modified themselves.

Summertime

Matt and Mike became an ironclad duo. Not even the fact that they worked from opposite sides of the Atlantic could stop them. Mike turned out to be a British programmer with 20 years of experience, who successfully balanced the youthful enthusiasm of Matt the student. It was the seasoned software engineer who insisted that they first think about a good, stable and scalable architecture for the new application, and only then turn to the details. Matt was self-taught and inexperienced in the field, but ready to learn and full of ideas.

And what happened to the creator of b2/cafelog, whom Matt had searched for so persistently? Michel Valdrighi saw the duo's project and decided to join them. It turned out he had created the venture—WP's “dad”—two years earlier, because he didn't like the way the other popular blogging platforms worked. He saw a lot of good ideas in Matt and Mike's innovations, and the three carried on together. Their project found fertile ground just as open-source programming was starting to become seriously fashionable.

Stairway to the Stars

In the very first months of this story, many other creators of similar projects joined Matt and Mike, abandoning their own because they saw a solid foundation in this one. Around that time the site WordPress.org appeared, and its homepage stated it clearly: “WordPress is a semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.”

At first the project served only end users, people who wanted a site without writing a single line of code. But then it became clear that the venture would be even more useful if it allowed any programmer to extend it with their own skills.

That possibility arrived with version 1.2 in May 2004, at the suggestion of Ryan Boren. He was also the author of the first plugin—small pieces of code that anyone can add to extend the basic capabilities of their WordPress site.

Somewhere around here things started moving at breakneck speed: from April to May, downloads of the platform jumped from 8,000 to 19,000. By 2011 there were already a million sites around the world built on the platform.

More and more developers joined in, the community of WordPress enthusiasts across the planet grew, and large-scale gatherings began to be organized.

When the Saints Go Marching in

Matt Mullenweg himself still works tirelessly to make the platform better. He takes part in many events that bring the WordPress community together, and he has even been to Bulgaria.

But if you think that, as the creator of an open-source platform, he never achieved financial success… it's only fair to point out that he later founded the software company Automattic, which today has almost 2,000 employees. Long before other companies were forced to switch to remote work, he built it in as the model. And with a minimum of pointless meetings, in favor of fuller and more direct communication.

Today his fortune is estimated at $400 million. His entrepreneurial spirit doesn't get in the way of working for the common good; somehow the two complement each other. His first business was washing windows, and at school he assembled computers.

In fact, shortly after WordPress launched, he dropped out of university. He received job offers from Google, Yahoo and many others, but chose CNET because they promised him more free time and no strict supervision. Then, at 21, he decided to retire as an employee and start his own company. One working in the same field, simply building on the foundations laid by the free and universally accessible WordPress.

Its biggest success is the site wordpress.com, which lets people create more personalized sites through paid services. Matt's decision to build in this direction was received rather controversially by the community, but it didn't seriously dent his reputation as the platform's creator.

Hello Dolly!

And so at last we come to the jazz. What on earth does it have to do with a platform for websites?

A stylish choice by the creators, well known to WP fans, is that every new version of the platform is named after a jazz musician the developers love. The first official version, from January 2004, bears the name of Miles Davis, and the latest, from May 2022, is named after Arturo O'Farrill. With each new release, the creators of WordPress also put out a short playlist of their favorite performances by the chosen jazzman.

One of the plugins Matt created later is called Hello Dolly, after his favorite song. “This is not just a plugin, it symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in two words sung most famously by Louis Armstrong,” Matt writes. Once activated, every time the admin panel loads, it displays a few random words from the lyrics of the popular jazz tune.

The plugin is symbolic because it pays tribute to the musician while also telling how the WordPress story began. It passes on the message that still unites the community today and keeps drawing people from all over the world: that the internet should be free and that everyone has the right to a place of their own in it.

I Got Rhythm

“Actually, a common trait of successful people is that they are voracious readers,” Matt says.

“Technology bridges the gap between what a person can imagine and what they can do. As a result, it creates a level playing field like nothing ever before in human history.”

He still writes on his blog. Like many of the pioneers, he is quite critical of the path the web has taken: of the monopolies, the business built on our data, the hidden fine print lying in wait for us there. At the end of last year he responded to a long article whose headline asked, “Can Matt Save the Internet?”

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with ‘no.’ I can't save the internet, but you know who can? A movement. A community of like-minded people, united by a shared philosophy, working together to build the tools of freedom. Being able to see how technology works and to change it is a human right. It is as much a right as freedom of speech or religion. And my plan is to dedicate the rest of my life to fighting for it.”

“Technology is best when it brings people together,” says Matt Mullenweg. His most successful project is a wonderful example of how sometimes that really can happen.

Coming Friday on Digital Stories: an interview with a Bulgarian who wrote part of the code that sits in the core of WordPress today. Now, with his agency, he looks after sites with 1,000,000,000 visits a month! What do things look like from the other side?

Stewart Butterfield is the man with the most reason to buy everyone a round for the way the pandemic changed our lives. However many rounds he buys, though, he'll still have plenty left (as long as he isn't buying them in Sunny Beach, the Bulgarian Black Sea resort famous for its eye-watering bar tabs), because his latest project was bought for the sum in the headline, and he walked away with a considerable share of the money.

Never heard of Butterfield? He's well worth knowing: the father of Slack has an instructive story that runs through the different eras of the internet to remind us that even when life is going well… sometimes the stunning success you've spent so long preparing for finally arrives.

And do you know his secret? It lies in the conclusions he drew from the failure of one of his computer games, a full 30 years earlier…

In His Prime

It really is strange that his name isn't better known. For three decades now he has been building applications whose whole idea is to harness modern technology to help people communicate.

He was born in 1973 and fell for the grandfathers of today's computers as a small boy. That generation, swept up in the whirlpool of early internet enthusiasm, seems to have had quite a run of luck—Musk and Sundar Pichai were born just a year earlier.

At 16, Stewart managed to cause a serious crash that crumpled his father's car beyond recognition. His mother's reaction says everything about the liberal upbringing he received: “Well, it's a very good thing this happened to you, because now you've learned an important lesson about road safety.”

The future tycoon was born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield. He decided to rename himself Stewart when he was only 12, and later admitted it wasn't a great idea. “There isn't a single book where the good guy is called that.” Apparently he never came across the adventures of that good little mouse, Stuart Little.

A Site the Size of a Human Palm

Our Stewart, however, is no mouse at heart but an innovative entrepreneur. He was lucky enough to have a computer at home from an early age. He was playing on an Apple II as far back as 1979, teaching himself to program from magazines that happened to come his way.

Then came his first contact with the network. “It was 1992, and I just couldn't believe the technology we already had!” Stewart recalls.

As he tells it, he was one of five people in town who could write HTML. The internet boom was just beginning, and the boy earned a decent income building the primitive websites of the day. To give you a sense of how ancient that era was, Stewart also organized the 5K contest, a competition for websites smaller than 5 kilobytes.

Despite all that, he decided to study… philosophy. He earned a bachelor's degree, then a master's. Learning came easily, the field excited him, until at some point… he simply realized there was nothing he could do with this education. “Have you ever heard of a philosophy firm opening a new position?” Stewart jokes.

Silicon Philosophers

He gave up the idea of a PhD in philosophy because he didn't see much of a future in it. “A lot of my professors told me: academic life is awful, please don't go into it. If you're that interested in these subjects, you can subscribe to some journals and go to conferences.”

It was right around then that the internet, which had started to look a great deal better, pulled him back in. Stewart decided to take on some serious venture that could also become a livelihood.

To raise capital, he spent several years working as a web designer, and in 2002 he founded his first computer game company. He called his pilot venture “Game Neverending.” As Stewart himself would later admit, after a long wait… he had picked the worst possible moment to start a new project. In the software world this period is known as the “dot-com bubble,” the time when suddenly everyone decided to invest in the internet, while it was still neither that popular nor technically ready for serious challenges.

As the name suggests, in this game you didn't lose or win; you just kept on playing and playing. As one commenter put it, “maybe it was too intellectual. Dr. Seuss meets Monty Python, who meets Borges. And all that in an era when games like FarmVille were only just starting to catch on.”

Homo Ludens

One of the fans of the “neverending game,” Cal Henderson, built a fan site for the project and wrote enthusiastic letters to the team. Stewart decided to hire him, and the two have worked together ever since—Cal is also among the shareholders who profited from the sale of Slack.

Stewart's vision was a multimedia project played by many participants online. The game prototype, however, never found the investors it needed, and after a stubborn fight the fledgling entrepreneur had to let go of the people he had hired… Fortunately, that changed thanks to an unexpected brainwave.

The idea arrived in a rather “amusing” way. Stewart and his then wife and business partner, Caterina Fake, had to fly to New York for a big computer game conference. Both of them got food poisoning during the flight, barely made it to the hotel and spent the whole night in real misery… And in the morning, Stewart woke up with the idea for Flickr.

Of course, we don't recommend this method for summoning brilliant ideas, although it clearly worked rather well for our hero.

And he decided to try something unconventional: to use the part of the game's software that dealt with online communication. Stewart invited the game's few loyal users to join a completely different venture. And so Flickr was born, the photo-sharing social network that paved the way for many of the trends in how we communicate online today.

For the first time, people could upload a whoooole 200 photos online for free and easily share them with their friends. Today that may sound like a drop in the ocean, but 20 years ago it was downright incredible.

The Tiny Speck

Flickr's success quickly drew attention, and before long the company was acquired by one of the big online players of the time—Yahoo!—for 20 million dollars. The deal turned quite a few heads, because by the web standards of the day it was a very serious sum.

The time came for our hero to enjoy his success, and he worked for another four years at the company that was no longer his.

Until, in 2009, he decided it was time to try something even bolder. For the second time he turned to computer games… and for the second time he failed. And once again he found a spectacular way out of the dead end, this time creating a company worth not millions but tens of billions of dollars.

It all began with Tiny Speck, a company working on a computer game called Glitch. By now Stewart had experience and assembled a solid team. As he puts it, if the team on his first game had been a two out of ten, here he was working with top professionals who were a 10/10.

There was even serious funding. The startup raised a full 17.5 million dollars from investors and began building an ever better product… but once again the users simply weren't there. Everything looked promising, and the game's reviews were good. But to succeed online, you also need that particle of magic which shows that the venture has arrived at the right time and caught the attention of the right people.

The battle went on for three and a half years, until at some point it became clear that the venture was doomed. There was $5.5 million of investment left, and the game's users were desperately few. By then the company had 45 full-time employees. Among them were animators, musicians, writers and illustrators, many of whom would have struggled to find their next job if they were thrown out on the street. “I felt that if I gave up, it would be running away from responsibility,” Stewart recalls. “I just had to come up with something else.”

He hit on yet another crazy idea and, luckily for him, the investors agreed to it; they didn't have much left to lose anyway. And how that decision would pay them back!

Slack, With or Without the Polish

His first task was to take care of the people who had no place in the next venture. Stewart spent a large part of the remaining money on building good portfolios and presentations for them and did everything he could to help them find even better-paid jobs.

Only then did he turn, together with the eight remaining members of the team, to the idea that had come to him. Far fewer in number than Leonidas's Spartans, they proved good enough to build one of the fastest-growing startups in history.

Having once already “packaged” and sold a side project after his main one failed, he decided to try again. The programmer was very pleased with the team's internal communication system and decided to focus on developing it.

Today many of us use that very same communication system every day. We know it as Slack.

Slack the Octopus

Back then, every online communication tool relied on principles dating back to the dawn of the internet. If you're one of the “online dinosaurs,” you surely remember mIRC, the grandfather of chat. Well, chat apps kept being built on that same IRC (Internet Relay Chat) principle for a long time afterward. And it was Stewart who established what came next.

The main problem was that when the user on the other end wasn't online, there was no way to send them a message that would be stored and would reach them once they showed up on the network. That was exactly what our hero's programmers had managed to achieve “without meaning to” with their internal communication system.

And that, together with solidly guaranteed message security, gradually turned Slack into the ideal platform for workplace communication. Then, for the first time, came the ability to search through messages, which made users' lives even easier. Today we can safely say that this app has become the standard in its field.

You're Loaded

Slack turned out to be perhaps the biggest winner of all at the epicenter of the pandemic. Countless companies suddenly found themselves in the brand-new situation of having to switch to remote work overnight. It must have been a huge challenge for Slack's servers, but they held up impressively. Communication over the professional network remained unbreakable, despite the “heavy” video calls that only a few years earlier would have been unthinkable online.

“At first we had countless dumb ideas. After three weeks of pondering, we decided that the internal communication system we'd built while working on the game might be the product worth building,” Stewart recalls.

“Slowly, almost without noticing, we managed to create a system that covered all the ways communication happens in companies. It turned out to be really useful; at some point we were sure we had something we never wanted to work without again.”

The launch of Slack was announced in August 2013. By December 2015 the project had already attracted $340 million in investment and was used every day by at least 2 million people, about 570,000 of them paying subscribers.

This time Stewart found himself at the center of events at exactly the right moment. The deal in which the giant Salesforce acquired our hero's venture for $27.7 billion became the business event of 2021. At the time, our hero held 8 percent of the shares, which brought him a “modest” 1.3 billion dollars.

Outplaying the Game

As we've heard firsthand here on Digital Stories, the startup ecosystem very often turns into a roller coaster of horrors. It's fascinating to hear the conclusions of a man who has seen so much of both directions—failure and dizzying success.

“For me, the most wonderful methodology for building software goes like this: don't overthink what you're doing, forget about your ego, and forget about any expectations, too,” is Stewart Butterfield's advice in a nutshell.

And so, on both rides on the roller coaster, for Stewart everything began with a game and ended with a communication tool.

“The whole idea came from my father, who loved bridge. It was hard for him to find good partners, and playing against the computer bored him. So my idea was to bring people together so they could play but also talk to one another. It's a useful exercise to get your brain moving with a game. But there also has to be the element of friendship, of small talk around the table, of some competition,” says the creator of Slack.

“It's not games that have always interested me, but rather playing as an excuse for social interaction with others,” Stewart adds.

And here we are, back at communication and its online dimensions. What does the future have in store for us there? For now, at least, Stewart hasn't let on that he's working on his next game project to point us the way. We'll wait for him to spend some of his fortune and come back, and until then all we can do is guess what's coming in the hyperdynamic world of online communication…

In the meantime, if the world of entrepreneurship interests you, on Friday a new themed read awaits you—a meeting with a Bulgarian woman who travels the world gathering the essentials from the stories of successful entrepreneurs.

Updated on October 9, 2024

How did a computer scientist earn… the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics?! Why did one of the people who made the great artificial intelligence boom of recent years possible… suddenly say that he regrets his life's work? He even left his cozy job at Google so that he could speak freely about the risks that come with artificial intelligence.

Geoffrey Hinton stands tall in the face of the big questions. Both metaphorically and literally, because, in his own words, a health problem has kept him from sitting down since 2005.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using AI for bad things.” “It's not inconceivable that AI could wipe out humanity,” the great scientist says. And also: “We need to think much harder about how to control AI systems that are capable of improving themselves.”

A remarkable and deeply important digital story awaits us.

Caught in the Net

Neural networks, artificial intelligence… we repeat and hear these terms every day without stopping to think how closely they are tied to the idea of software that mimics the human brain.

That is no accident; the association is logical. The first person not only to think of it but to put it into practice is today's hero, one of the greatest scientists of our time. We owe Geoffrey Hinton a huge share of the progress we see today in the ever-so-topical field of artificial intelligence.

He is often called “the Godfather” or “the Father of AI,” which he finds… rather amusing. Because, among everything else, he has that typically British sense of humor.

Artificial Intelligence, Sir

Back when Hinton proposed computer systems that work on the principle of the human brain, it sounded like (un)scientific fiction. But he was convinced of his concept, because he was one of the few people with deep enough knowledge in both directions: cognitive science and software engineering.

From an early age Geoffrey was interested in how our brain works, and once he got talking about it with a friend. Together they reached the conclusion that memories are stored in the brain in a multilayered network of neurons, much as the data for a three-dimensional hologram is kept on a computer's hard drive.

His curiosity was piqued and he dug into the subject. As a result, he concluded that modern science still could not answer many of the questions about how our most important organ, evolutionarily speaking, actually functions. Neither psychologists nor neuroscientists could say what physiological mechanisms intelligence depends on.

Elementary, Jeeves

Over the following years Geoffrey specialized in this field—he earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at Cambridge and a PhD in artificial intelligence at Edinburgh. He also began teaching. His main research interests lay in software that imitates the workings of the brain, with the aim of studying the brain itself.

Then, however, Hinton arrived at the fundamental idea behind today's AI boom: if the right structures are used, computers can learn and develop an intelligence of their own, similar to human intelligence.

This is how the field was born that today gives us incredible possibilities in all kinds of directions: from self-driving cars to facial recognition. And… ChatGPT.

“In science, you can say things that seem crazy, but in the long run they can turn out to be right,” Hinton says.

Of course, the term “artificial intelligence” existed long before the Brit gave it its present meaning. Before deep neural networks came along, though, it meant far simpler algorithms. They had no way of detecting subtle patterns, and that is precisely the task we want artificial intelligence to perform.

Neural networks have been talked about since the dawn of the computer age. They are sequences of algorithms “arranged” in layers that can process information and look for patterns the way the human brain does.

Three AIs in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

In the late 1950s, all eyes turned to the Cornell researcher Frank Rosenblatt, creator of the Perceptron. The program, built on the primitive computer platforms of the day, could supposedly recognize the image of an apple. It was also the first to bear the title “neural network.” Alas, rather unconvincingly.

In 1958 The New York Times ran a big story explaining how the Perceptron would become the first machine capable of working like the human brain. “Later Perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names,” it continued, promising one day a machine that could “walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.”

But the Perceptron couldn't even tell left from right. It failed at its main task, too. And while it was running, the primitive computer looked more like a parody of a sci-fi horror film. A conglomerate of randomly assembled refrigerator doors and computer cogs.

For the next 40 years nobody wanted to mention the idea of a neural network again. Hinton, too, ran into the skepticism of his professors, which would inevitably accompany him all the way. But he didn't give up.

Perhaps the secret of his stubbornness lies somewhere in his genes. His middle name is Everest: the man after whom the planet's highest peak is named is among his ancestors. His great-great-grandfather was George Boole, the father of Boolean algebra, whose foundations programmers use every day. They even say his name aloud, thanks to the type of variable named after him—the Boolean.

Mr. AI, I Presume?

Two major breakthroughs are linked to Geoffrey Hinton's name. In 1986 he stepped into the spotlight after he and two co-authors published a paper that dusted the cobwebs off the concept of neural networks. It was enriched by the idea that the algorithms should process information in both directions. Once the information has passed through the sequence of layers, it must also be processed “in reverse,” to check how accurate the patterns found really are.

Even the biggest skeptics were persuaded that the proposed solution had enormous potential. Alas, computers at the time were still not ready for the next big steps; the ideas were far ahead of the technology.

So came the long period known as the “AI winter.” Progress stalled, and the few specialists in the field turned to other areas.

But then the moment arrived. In the new millennium, computers accumulated ever more impressive computing power. By 2004 Hinton was living in Canada and received the trust he needed to make the long-awaited breakthrough. The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research offered him serious funding to create a joint program bringing together computer scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists and people from other fields to work in this direction.

AI Save the King

Which brings us to 2012, when, again with colleagues, Hinton presented the first impressively well-performing model that could classify photographs with remarkable accuracy—recognizing what is shown in the image it is given. It did so considerably better than a human!

His co-authors in this venture were two other remarkable scientists of today's AI world. Ilya Sutskever—co-founder and, until recently, chief scientist at OpenAI—recalls with nostalgia the “AI winter,” when their profession seemed doomed. “We were complete outsiders, but at the same time we felt we knew something more about the world, and that made us feel special.”

The trio was completed by Alex Krizhevsky. “AI is something like the ultimate goal of computer science,” he says today. “Its aim is to automate more things, and artificial intelligence aims to automate absolutely everything.”

And so Hinton and his colleagues entered an annual competition for systems that recognize the images in the popular ImageNet database. They won by a whopping 10 percent margin over their rivals. And, more importantly, they turned out to be more accurate even than the human eye.

“The reason I have influence in this field today is that I was one of the few who believed in neural networks. But I was so convinced of them that all the students spontaneously trusted me and came to work with me. I was lucky enough to be able to pick only the best,” Geoffrey Hinton recalls of those days.

After the competition, the team founded a company that was almost immediately acquired by Google for $400 million. After that, the names of the three became tied to various ventures of that very company.

Sir AI

Their algorithm proved a true revolution. Yes, to work well enough it relied on computing power unthinkable until recently, but it became the first indisputable application of deep neural networks.

The long-awaited future arrived like a wave. Some of today's biggest companies working on artificial intelligence appeared. Its applications are multiplying and the algorithms are getting better and better—we see it every day. And we can only guess whether we would have come this far if Mr. Geoffrey had not been so brave and so stubborn.

In 2018 came the first crowning achievement of his career. Together with fellow pioneers of the field—Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio—Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science.

Until 2023 Hinton kept working actively, by then as part of Google's team. That is exactly why, just as artificial intelligence became the topic of the day, the scientist's words rang out with terrible force: he now regretted his life's work and was leaving the tech giant so that he could speak freely about the risks that come with artificial intelligence. But we will get there.

Keep Calm and Carry On

“I think neural networks have a lot in common with Freud,” Hinton explains. “The idea that there is a thin visible layer of consciousness and all that seething stuff underneath. It isn't conscious, deliberate reasoning, but something else—something that works by analogy. Just like deep neural networks do.”

According to Hinton, they are the natural next step in the development of technology. “Early AI was based on logic. You try to make computers that reason like people. The second approach came from biology: you try to make computers that can perceive, act and adapt, like animals.”

It Has Become a Brain

After the breakthrough Hinton and his colleagues made in the world of deep neural networks, things changed. The same algorithms proved capable of wonders in different fields, and it is no accident that a future in which we reach artificial general intelligence—a neural network able to solve a vast range of different tasks—looks ever more likely. And from there… the road leads us to the goal Hinton himself has long awaited: a computer “brain” indistinguishable from the human one.

We can only guess where all this will take us. What is interesting, though, is what today's hero thinks about it.

He firmly believes that the future lies in exactly this direction, but that we still have many steps to go. In one of his landmark interviews he was asked whether machines really can be taught every activity the human brain is capable of. Could emotions be reproduced? Could everything human be recreated in neural networks?

“I'm 99.9 percent sure,” Hinton replied. “The remaining 0.1 percent, for me, is the probability that we're living in a giant simulation.”

You know that typical British self-assurance and that distinctive sense of humor. Even so, his conviction gives us food for thought.

Until recently the professor used to say that we could reach human-level intelligence, but not for at least the next 40 years. Then something changed abruptly.

Gentlemen of Fortune

Geoffrey Hinton has shown that he knows how to fight for his ideas, even when they are unpopular. The same goes for his personal life. He and his first wife had just managed, after long tribulations, to adopt a boy and a girl when she was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer. Within a few months Hinton was a single father, raising the kids in the very years of his greatest scientific successes. His son turned out to have attention deficit disorder.

He later married again, but decided to keep his private life secret, and little is known about his second marriage. At some point his second wife also heard the diagnosis “cancer,” but fortunately she recovered.

And Geoffrey Hinton remains a gentleman who rarely talks about such things. One more sign of his character: the scientist suffers from constant severe pain. At 19 he injured his back carrying a space heater to his mother's room. This set off a herniated disc that gradually got worse. And his solution to the problem? In his own words, he has not sat down once since 2005.

A Man in the Right Place

For many years Geoffrey and his family lived in the United States, where he believed the soil for his work was more fertile. But as a man of left-wing political views, he emigrated to Canada during the Reagan years because he felt stifled.

Although today he is considered Canadian, having lived in the northern country for several decades, he remains British at heart. “Irony is one of the hard things to teach algorithms,” he says. “First we have to make them masters of literature. But Americans don't get irony either. So computers will reach the level of Americans before they reach the level of the British.”

Until recently Geoffrey used to say that he counted on algorithms to help us in more and more areas. “I think artificial intelligence will make our lives easier. The potential dangers some people talk about have nothing to do with the technology itself; they have to do with how human society is organized. Being a socialist, I feel that when technology brings higher productivity, everyone should share in its benefits.”

A Brit in King Reagan's Court

“We actually are machines!” believes the researcher who, as we have seen, definitely knows what he is talking about. “We're just produced biologically. Most people doing AI don't have any doubt that we're machines. We're just extremely fancy machines. And I shouldn't say ‘just.’ We're special, wonderful machines!”

So don't count on him for precise predictions about the future that awaits us. But do count on him for the technologies that will bring it about.

In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Geoffrey Hinton appeared in the specialist media with striking news. Staying at home had helped him devise a whole new model of algorithms based on neural networks that could far outstrip today's!

Glom, Glom

He calls his new principle GLOM and describes it as “the best I think brings the different directions together.” He admits that for now he is not offering a ready, working model, but rather a concept that the scientists who come next must develop further in order to take the next big step in artificial intelligence. Hinton explains that GLOM is a way to model human perception in a machine—it gives us a new way of processing visual information. It tackles two main problems facing this type of algorithm today. So far, they successfully identify the various elements in the picture they see, but cannot tell where those elements are in relation to one another. Nor can they shift their perspective on them. GLOM, however, promises wonders in this direction.

And that could help us a great deal in the areas where algorithms have not yet delivered the long-awaited results.

“The main goal of my life is to understand how the brain works. And all these technologies come as attempts to do that. They don't work like the brain, but they are quite useful side effects,” Hinton says.

Boom!

And just as we had grown used to thinking of Hinton as a man who dislikes media appearances, that changed abruptly once his “brainchild” stepped into the spotlight with the arrival of ChatGPT.

On May 1, 2023, he told The New York Times that he was resigning from Google so that he could “talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts” his former employer. He added that “a part of him now regrets his life's work.” “Artificial general intelligence may be less than 20 years away and will bring changes comparable in scale to the Industrial Revolution or electricity,” he now warned. And when the Brit, until recently so conservative in his views, says something like that, I think his words deserve a closer look. We should talk about this more.

After years of speaking with moderate optimism about the future, at the end of 2023 Geoffrey gave another detailed interview in which he explained the risks that loom ahead. “AI technologies will in time upend the labor market and take away more than just the drudgery.” What's more, governments will very soon have to consider introducing a universal basic income. AI will sharply increase productivity, but if left unchecked, it will only make the rich richer and hurt the people who may lose their jobs. “That's going to be very bad for society,” he also warned.

“It's not inconceivable that AI could wipe out humanity.” “We need to think much harder about how to control AI systems that are capable of improving themselves.” Otherwise they may become power-hungry or decide to protect themselves from being switched off so they can carry out further tasks. And, without exaggeration, in his view they could become a risk to all of humanity.

And also: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using AI for bad things.”

Nobel? No way…

And so we come to the final touch. I couldn't find exact betting odds, but I read at least 20 lists in tech and science media predicting who would win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. Not one of them included the name of today's hero. Hardly anyone outside the committee awarding the prizes imagined that it would go to Geoffrey Hinton, shared with the physicist John Hopfield, who was likewise honored for work underpinning deep neural networks.

“But that's not physics,” more than a few science popularizers exclaimed online.

Well, it's not my job to judge what is physics and what isn't. But the news of the prize is wonderful, because now what the great scientist has to tell us will be heard even more widely. The big questions he raises about the future will echo ever louder. So will the absence of conversations in search of the big answers, which it is high time we discussed more actively. It is precisely because of them, by the way, that the Digital Stories site exists.

The human brain remains a miracle. But technology, too, brings many miracles, thanks to people like today's hero. What might they have in store for our future?