A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a $1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI

For a while successful the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized container successful Abu Dhabi was considered the top chess subordinate successful the world. Its sanction was Hydra, and it was a tiny super-computer—a furniture afloat of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung unneurotic with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet.

At a clip erstwhile chess was inactive the main gladiatorial arena for contention betwixt humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits were concisely the worldly of legend. The New Yorker published a contemplative 5,000-word diagnostic astir its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “fearsome”; and chess publications covered its victories with the unit of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” quality expansive masters.

True to signifier arsenic a monster, Hydra was besides isolated and strange. Other precocious chess engines astatine the time—Hydra’s rivals—ran connected mean PCs and were disposable for anyone to download. But the afloat powerfulness of Hydra’s 32-processor clump could beryllium utilized by lone 1 idiosyncratic astatine a time. And by the summertime of 2005, adjacent the members of Hydra’s improvement squad were struggling to get a crook with their creation.

That’s due to the fact that the team’s patron—the past 36-year-old Emirati antheral who’d hired them and enactment up the wealth for Hydra’s souped-up hardware—was excessively engaged reaping his reward. On an online chess forum successful 2005, Hydra’s Austrian main architect, Chrilly Donninger, described this benefactor arsenic the top “computer chess freak” alive. “The sponsor,” helium wrote, “loves to play time and nighttime with Hydra.”

Under the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor would log successful to online chess tournaments and, with Hydra, play arsenic a human-computer team. More often than not, they would trounce the competition. “He loved the powerfulness of antheral positive machine,” 1 technologist told me. “He loved to win.”

Hydra yet got overtaken by different chess computers and was discontinued successful the precocious 2000s. But zor_champ went connected to go 1 of the astir powerful, slightest understood men successful the world. His existent sanction is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.

A bearded, wiry fig who’s astir ne'er seen without acheronian sunglasses, Tahnoun is the United Arab Emirates’ nationalist information adviser—the quality main to 1 of the world’s wealthiest and astir surveillance-happy tiny nations. He’s besides the younger member of the country’s hereditary, autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. But possibly astir important, and astir bizarrely for a spymaster, Tahnoun wields authoritative power implicit overmuch of Abu Dhabi’s immense sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported past twelvemonth that helium straight oversees a $1.5 trillion empire—more currency than conscionable astir anyone connected the planet.

In his idiosyncratic style, Tahnoun comes crossed arsenic one-third Gulf royal, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder, and one-third Bond villain. Among his many, galore concern interests, helium presides implicit a sprawling tech conglomerate called G42 (a notation to the publication The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, successful which “42” is simply a super-computer’s reply to the question of “life, the universe, and everything”). G42 has a manus successful everything from AI probe to biotechnology—with peculiar areas of spot successful state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech. Tahnoun is fanatical astir Brazilian jiujitsu and cycling. He wears his sunglasses adjacent astatine the gym due to the fact that of a sensitivity to light, and helium surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial arts fighters.

According to a businessman and a information advisor who’ve met with Tahnoun, visitors who marque it past his layers of loyal gatekeepers mightiness get a accidental to talk with him lone aft cycling laps with the sheikh astir his backstage velodrome. He has been known to walk hours successful a flotation chamber, the advisor says, and has flown wellness guru Peter Attia into the UAE to connection guidance connected longevity. According to a businessman who was contiguous for the discussion, Tahnoun adjacent inspired Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s almighty crown prince, to chopped backmost connected accelerated nutrient and articulation him successful a quest to unrecorded to 150.