Building a machine God

Cade Metz, At the Epicenter of A.I., Pope Leo’s Warnings Are Dismissed, NYTimes, May 26, 2026.

Jeremy Nixon is the 33 cofounder of A.G.I. House in San Francisco, which is a so-called “hacker house.”

Many of the founders and important researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI joined the earliest gatherings at A.G.I. House. Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.

Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.

A.I. has started to crack math problems that humans struggled with for decades, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. “Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,” he said.

This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.

“People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God,” said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. “They are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact.”

What Chris Olah said at the Vatican:

“What is actually happening inside them?” he said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.”

Mr. Nixon thought Mr. Olah’s speech was far more spiritual than the words delivered by the pope, even if Mr. Olah was making claims that were not necessarily based on science. Though Mr. Olah hinted that chatbots may have working lives of their own, Mr. Nixon said, they are still very much dependent on humans to do anything, as Mr. Olah noted.

“A.I. is still controlled by people who are trying to make money or solve some mathematical problem or what have you,” Mr. Nixon said.

But what is clear, he added, is that A.I. researchers are trying to build technologies that have jobs, feel joy and pain, and exhibit all sorts of qualities that match and even exceed the traits that make us human. He believes it could happen within the decade. [...]

“A.I. and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming,” he said.

There's more at the link.