I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

I was tested with no conclusive result, but it was also during a listeria outbreak which I was not tested for.

It was a rough few months.

But I am mostly well. Finishing up the process is basically just a matter of time. :-D

Next project: Figure out how to support myself without a day-job! ;-)

I think it's a mistake to let the zealotry of the singularity weirdos cast doubt on everything that they're predicting; yes, they've got some pseudo-religious delusions about what AI will do for us, but I don't think they're far off when they say that it's coming, fairly soon, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

There are some very clear numerical reasons that AI has failed thus far (we simply don't have the computing power right now - people hoped that we were clever enough to find algorithmic workarounds, but apparently we weren't), and whatever happens in the actual field of AI research, we're all but guaranteed to succeed at brute force AI some time over the next 50 years or so. The only real question is whether someone is able to figure out a hack that makes brute force unnecessary and bumps the timetable forward, but as I mentioned above, so far nobody has, so we may just have to wait for full brain simulation to be feasible.

Apart from that, I'd agree with you: with a few notable exceptions, most Singularity inspired "work" has been very low ROI, amounting to little more than speculation about the future and how great it will be rather than actually doing something to ensure a good outcome. There also seems to be a common delusion (again, with a few important exceptions) that AI will automatically be friendly without us needing to spend significant efforts towards that goal, which is very misguided.

...especially since a lot of the best funded and most focused AI research is taking place in China right now. In the rest of the world the past failures of AI have made people assume that it's a fool's errand, so there's not a lot of money going towards it, which could be a real disaster - regardless of how friendly AI can be made in principle, it's pretty much assured that if the Chinese government gets there first, we're going to see some pretty nasty stuff (though an argument could be made that once any government gets there we're all screwed).

With that said, my own efforts are going into AI, not aging; the negative side of AI (recursive self-improvement by an agent with non-human-aligned goals) is something that, for all we know in this epistemic state, could happen at literally any time (hidden NSA lab finally achieved AI a month ago, it improved to superintelligence a week ago, cracked the protein folding problem, emailed some DNA strings to protein synthesis labs, got nanotechnology an hour ago, whoops we're all dead).

So if you're one of those people for whom problems don't exist unless they at least might destroy your self of tomorrow and not just your self of thirty years from now, I actually am spending my time on one of those problems.

But mostly I regard immediate temporal proximity as an invalid constraint on philanthropy.

2. He said that before taxes he had 30 million dollars, so the startup was sold for >=30 million dollars.

3. He is married and has an 11 year old daughter (and at least one more kid). Him and his wife are at least 30 years old.

4. At least one newspaper reported on him selling his startup.

I tried using CrunchBase to search for his startup but the list of companies sold in the last 5 years is huge...

Bottom line: the information is meant to be read but decency and common sense should prevent you from probing deeper. If you don't follow these guidelines, interesting people will stop posting online. Unrestrained curiosity in these situations leads to everyone losing.

Stop and think for a moment... Here's someone who made it! He's got what most of us want. And he's offering to talk about how he got where he is and how he thinks about his future direction. He's asking for comments on that direction... sure... but he's also giving us a gift.

Since he values his privacy, he asks that people respect that and not reveal who he really is.

So... instead of taking part in the real discussion, some people want to out the OP. which would effectively kill the interesting conversation and chill any potential other people out there who might be willing to to post the same kind of thread.

I visit HN mainly for the technical/startup articles. I would prefer, personally, for general interest items to remain on reddit, since I check both. It's not good vs. evil! We can have both.