Goertzel vs Epstein

Addressing questions regarding the Epstein Files and my AGI work

Dear all,

There has been some commentary online in recent days about my emails with Jeffrey Epstein as released in the “Epstein files,” and I felt compelled to post something to clarify. I have also recorded an accompanying 10-min video statement that pretty much covers the same ground though with fewer particulars.

Just to warn you, my interaction with Epstein was basically fairly boring; I had nothing to do with his personal life, I never went to his island or flew on his plane ... I did meet him F2F a number of times, and over the years I obtained a modest amount of AGI research funding from some of his foundations for some organizations helping with my AGI R&D. I was not in the know about his horrible crimes or I wouldn't have been dealing with him.

Next let me run through the TL;DR basics in a little more detail:

• ⁠⁠Over the last decades I have sought funding for AGI research from literally hundreds of sources. One of those was Epstein.

• Epstein seemed interested in and willing to support cutting edge research into AGI, at a time when very few recognized AGI as a serious pursuit. On this basis I reached out to him over the years to discuss AGI and he agreed to fund a number of research initiatives.

• Over roughly seventeen years of intermittent contact, the total funding I received from Epstein amounted to approximately $360K, much of it in small amounts — $2,000 here for a videographer, $3,000 there for conference refreshments, $10,000 for an AGI conference, portions of research grants for OpenCog work in Hong Kong. The largest chunk was a $100K donation in 2001 to the University of New Mexico for a one-year research fellowship for me. This funding was very useful at the time, but far from a major patronage. About $100K of this occurred after his 2008 sentencing, the rest before.

• This funding, and a few associated meetings with him in his offices, was the extent of my engagement with him. I was not engaged with him socially, we were not personal friends, I did not visit his island nor fly on his jet and had nothing to do with any of his criminal or immoral activities.

• As with others, in hindsight I would not have dealt with him or accepted his funds, and ought to have paid more attention to his background and subsequent reports of his wrongdoing. I failed to do the due diligence and naively accepted his narrative.

• Epstein’s criminal conduct, be it financial or perverse, stand utterly in contrast to my values and the vision of a just and beneficial society for all, which motivates all my AI work. My thoughts and condolences are with the victims, whose situations I did not imagine when I was dealing with him. I want justice for the victims, and I support the release of all files and activation of all measures that could possibly help them and punish any wrongdoing to the full extent of the law. I deeply regret having engaged with him.

For those who have an interest in further detail, I will tell now a bit more about my funder-fundee relationship to Jeffrey Epstein.

My Background

First of all, for those that don’t know me, and who may have just stumbled upon this post due to the Epstein Files, let me give a very quick intro: I’m an AGI researcher, mathematician, cognitive scientist and entrepreneur … I’ve been pursuing AGI since the 1980s (well before I released the 2005 book “Artificial General Intelligence” that put the term on the map), and have written a large number of books and papers on related topics, as well as leading open-source AGI projects like OpenCog and Hyperon. I led the software team behind Sophia, the first robot citizen, and have led a variety of AI application projects in various vertical areas over the decades, including founding the first blockchain-based AI agents platform (SingularityNET) in 2017. Over the course of all this work and timeI have roamed the world seeking AGI collaboration and funding in various forms.

One of the stranger places my quest for AGI research funding led me was to some limited interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, whom I encountered as a funder of innovative science initiatives in general. Folks who are young now or don’t know the science world may have a hard time understanding that raising funds for AGI was very, very, very hard for most of my career. Until quite recently AGI was an obscure little corner of science and nobody really believed in it, nothing like today where everyone is investing in AGI and the concept is broadly taken seriously. At that time I was first introduced to Epstein, I was literally struggling to pay rent for myself and my wife and 3 young kids; and Epstein was recommended to me as a billionaire funding other frontier scientists (we know now his wealth may not have been quite to the billion dollar mark, but that’s how he was presented at the time).

The difficulty of keeping an AGI research programme going during a lean time for AGI made me a perfect target for Epstein’s well-honed social-engineering skills. When someone scams you via social-engineering it always seems obvious like you should have known it at the time... but they are paying close attention to playing YOU whereas you are distracted and focused on other things and they have the advantage, because they know they’re playing a very careful game and you don’t… He social-engineered not only me but Marvin Minsky, Noam Chomsky, Seth Lloyd, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and etc. etc. He social-engineered the business tycoon Leslie Wexner, apparently, out of several hundred million dollars. He played many others much worse than me, but that doesn’t lessen the bite I feel from having been sucked in myself.

Meeting Epstein

I met Jeffrey Epstein through some mutual friends in NYC in 2001 -- one was a cognitive scientist who worked for me at Webmind Inc., the other a computer scientist who had been funded by him. I could see he had been funding some other well known scientists already as well, such as Martin Nowak at Princeton, Stephen Kosslyn at Harvard, and Marvin Minsky (the founder of AI).

My first meeting with Epstein was 1-1 in one of his offices in New York, and he came across as strange and intense. I was made a bit uncomfortable by his way of questioning me and why my work wasn’t already well funded if it was so great; however, I had met other billionaires before in different contexts and, while not sharing Epstein’s interest in AGI and frontier science, they had also been bizarre in their own ways. He was pretty slick and very practiced in controlling the impression he made on people. He also came across as very smart and asked deep questions about my AGI work, more so than most potential AGI funding sources I talked to in that period (and there were many). In the process of trying to raise funds, you try to grasp who is most likely to want to fund you, and demonstrating a certain level of interest and understanding was a hopeful indicator for me.

I met with him a few times at his NYC offices and twice in his Florida offices. It was always an office-building or home-office setting. I never hung out with him in a social setting, never went to his island or flew in his jet or saw him partying with girlfriends or anything like that.

Funds Received

Shortly after I met Epstein, I received funding from one of his foundations. He funded a research fellowship for me at the University of New Mexico in 2001-2002, in the amount of approximately $100K (including university overheads). That was my biggest chunk of funding from him ever, the money he donated to my projects after that was in smaller bits and pieces over the years.

Epstein was fairly technically savvy and had a lot of ideas about AI. He understood the field at least moderately well, along with other areas of science like physics; his own AI ideas that he shared were not terribly stupid, nor were they terribly brilliant. On the whole I never paid much attention to his suggestions on research, nor did they influence my work in any way. Two AI recommendations from him do stick in my memory though:

• He was keen on IQ testing for AIs, and I devised a scheme adapting standard child IQ tests for AIs and robots — but it never got funded. Modern LLMs and VLAs would pass it, though they’re not yet AGI — and the risk of knowledgeable AI systems “gaming the test” was something that concerned me even then.

• He once proposed that “deception” was the core of all intelligence and of molecular biology — central to babies learning theory of mind and even to enzymatic reactions in the origin of life. I thought he was straining things and said so — but in retrospect, this line of thinking obviously tells a lot about his own psychology.

Overall, he was interested in what I was doing but never tried to exert control over the research or involve himself in the day-to-day direction of any of my projects..

We talked a bit about collaborating on AI trading algorithms – something I had worked on in the late 90s before ever meeting Epstein (I held the first patent for use of natural language in financial prediction). Since he was a money manager it was a natural potential point of collaboration. He did seem to have a fairly strong grasp on financial markets and quantitative finance. However, we never proceeded with any work in this direction. In the end he seemed to feel he had cleverer ways to make money on the markets via his inside connections, and was getting better edge this way than quantitative algorithms would be able to provide. At the time we had this conversation I believed he was more of a legit finance guy than he may have actually been; I did not realize his revenue model was centered on blackmail and theft, which now seems likely to have been the case.

The bits and pieces of money he put into my projects over the years seems to break down as follows (this is mostly reconstructed from the Epstein files emails, and might be slightly off in some detail, but it’s basically correct):

• 2001: $100K for a 1 year research grant at the University of New Mexico

• 2009: $2K for a videographer (donated to Singularity Institute), a conference sponsorship for $10K, and some fund to sponsor me to work on a book for 6 months - I don’t exactly recall how much but I believe it was $50K. (This book was Engineering General Intelligence and came out finally in 2014, in two volumes.)

• 2011: $10K through Humanity+ to support my AGI work

• 2013: a $30K donation through Humanity+ and a $20K donation to fulfill the “matching private funding” requirements of a Hong Kong government research grant on OpenCog applications.

• 2014: a $45k donation to fulfill the “matching private funding” requirements of another Hong Kong government research grant on OpenCog applications … and a $25k donation to the AI Lab in Ethiopia (which interested Epstein largely because he wanted to issue a press release on his funding of AI in Africa)

• 2015: a $35K donation to fulfill the “matching private funding” requirements of a Hong Kong government research grant on OpenCog applications … and a $30K donation for analyzing public bio-ontologies and medical datasets for longevity research. Associated with this latter donation he also gave my team access to some servers at a private school in the Virgin Islands (not on his private island), which we spent some time configuring but never actually used due to the incompetent system-administrator on the school’s end.

• 2016: A $3k sponsorship of the drinks and snacks at a conference

My Mistake

Looking back, the point in my on-again/off-again interaction with Epstein where I feel I made a real mistake was when he went to jail in 2008 (sentenced to 13 months in Florida state prison, though after ~5 months he was given work release 5-6 days a week in his own local office).

He told me a distorted story: That he had been framed by his political enemies and sent to jail for soliciting prostitution, and I basically just believed him without doing my own research.

Right now Epstein is a big deal in the media, but back in 2008 his jail term was not really big-time headline news – the headlines were the financial crisis, which was wreaking havoc with my small AI businesses – I had a company called StockMood that was using AI to predict market sentiment, and we shut it down after the huge market crash that fall since we could see the sentiment would be totally negative for a while, rendering our product useless. I was also going through a divorce at the time and trying to minimize the impact on my 3 young kids – anyway the difficulties of this rich guy who had provided me with a little bit of funding here and there, were very low on my priority list.

When I look at my emails to him now, I see my past self referencing media headlines about Prince Andrew and Epstein, describing it as a “moronic media shitstorm” and speculating that what had transpired was “surely an occurrence among reasonably mature people who mutually consented at the time.” I was still naively convinced of the political framing narrative, as I simply didn’t question that he was lying. I mean, the guy clearly was close to multiple political leaders (he knew Bill Clinton well and once introduced me to Ehud Barak at his home office), it wasn’t a random person whom you would per definition assume to not have political enemies. What he duped me – and many others – into believing was that he was just a typical billionaire playboy, who was getting harassed for his playboyish ways by political opponents in some sort of high-level intrigue. He fed me this line in a few phone calls, and I bought it, in hindsight kind of stupidly. But he was a master social engineer, as we can see now in the rear-view mirror.

“Status by Association”

One thing I can see clearly now is the shockingly proficient way Epstein used reputation and “status by association” to his advantage in an extremely expert manner. The fact that he was palling around with Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, as well as funding Harvard, Stanford and MIT, and hosting Nobel laureates etc. – made him seem “odd but legit” rather than “questionably creepy.” It made one feel like, by accepting his funding, one was joining some sort of elite exclusive club of top scientists and world leaders – which felt good to me at the time (bear in mind I was 34 when we first met and not so established in my career).

Part of his reason for associating himself with all these politicians and scientists was because he genuinely found them interesting – and part of the reason was precisely that it was useful for making him seem legit. You might call it “reputation-washing”, a factor I didn’t think about at the time.

Anyway, at the time of his first arrest in 2008 his “status by association” gave me enough comfort not to bother looking up from my own heavily-consuming life-troubles to dig into his doings. In particular I could see that, his legal problems notwithstanding, he was still totally accepted by Marvin Minsky and Noam Chomsky among a host of other scientists. Noam as the founder of modern linguistics was a legend to me at the time, on a par almost with Einstein or Aristotle; and Marvin was the original father of the AI field and someone I had known slightly for a few years… he could be difficult and argumentative but his brilliance was unquestionable. The fact that these two huge intellects were firmly in his orbit and not perturbed by his brush with the law made me feel reassured and guided me to not look too carefully.

I feel disgusted and very deeply regretful – as many others appearing in his emails surely do as well – to unknowingly have been part of the reputational facade that Jeffrey Epstein built around himself to influence others. Now I can see very clearly what were the dynamics that allow this to happen, and I won’t be fooled in this sort of way again.

Science Funding is Broadly Broken

Seeing some of the comments in recent news articles and social media about myself and other scientists mentioned in the Epstein files, it occurs to me that many journalists – and probably many others – don’t understand how modern science funding works... and doesn’t work. While it’s obviously of very secondary importance to achieving justice for Epstein’s victims, it is worth reflecting here on what this whole history of interaction between Epstein and scientists tells us about the way science funding works in our society. Even epically successful science contributors like Noam Chomsky, Marvin Minsky, Martin Nowak, Stephen Kosslyn, Seth Lloyd etc. were not able to get their research fully funded by conventional sources like government grants or corporate partnerships -- let alone researchers like myself who were further out of the mainstream (though now my work is much less so, as the mainstream has slowly begun to catch up with parts of my thinking on AGI).

So all of these folks, like me, end up resorting to shilling our ideas to various sources – including now and then eccentric billionaires – for research funds. Over and over and over again. Thousands of reach-outs – and frankly I dealt with each one as hastily as possible, because I was always eager to get back to doing the f**king research. I wouldn’t say I totally hated all the fundraising activity – I generally try to take some measure of joy in whatever it is I end up doing, because why not – but I considered it a digression of my valuable time from what really mattered, which was using my technical mind to figure out the details of beneficial AGI. In my spare cycles I was analyzing cognitive algorithms and representations, not the personal lives of my funding sources.

It happened that in this case, this sort of “spray and pray” research-funding strategy backfired, because I and a bunch of other scientists ended up getting funding from a horrifying sex pervert who social-engineered us into believing he was just a billionaire playboy hounded by his enemies. Not doing more digging into Epstein’s background and activities was a mistake on the part of myself and all these other colleagues. I won’t make this sort of mistake again. However, the overall dynamics that led to the creation of Epstein the perverted power broker, and put him in a position to offer scientists a bit of relief from the conventional research-funding rat-race, are still operative in our society. Due to the way research funding works, science is disturbingly centered on the political power echelons, the military, megacorporations and the ultra-rich. I have directed my work via my own intellectual intuition and have focused heavily on methods for building AGI in a decentralized and participatory way… however I have not been entirely able to escape the wealth and power dynamics in which we’re all embedded.

In Conclusion

Summing up – yes, some of my emails in the Epstein files are embarrassing to me when I look back at them now, and I feel Iike going back a couple decades and shouting in the ear of my past self to pay more attention, and maybe give him a kick in the ass. I’m not asking anyone to find the emails I sent to Epstein back then charming or appropriate. I am sure there are a lot of other awkward and embarrassing messages in my email archive too, which were sent to other people in other contexts and happen not to have been unwittingly sent to a sex criminal… I have never been a person to carefully craft all my private communications, as that leads me down rabbit holes that take me forever to get out of … I just tend to tap stuff out hastily and click send. What I have tried to do in this message is just explain the overall situation that led me to write these emails, inasmuch as I can recall by this point.

One thing that really hits me when I read these old emails is: “Wow, Ben, you are really ‘on the spectrum’ like so many other mathematicians and scientists, and you can be super tone-deaf sometimes in communication about nontechnical stuff.” I don’t mean to pose this as some sort of moral excuse – we each have to deal with our own cognitive peculiarities and learn to work around them in order to do the right things in the world – but perhaps my moderate dose of Aspergers is part of why I was so slow to fully grasp Epstein’s true nature, and this may have been true of some of the other scientists in his orbit as well.

As well as finding some of my old communication dorky and embarrassing, it also seems ridiculous to me in hindsight that I didn’t take the time to dig more into the reality of Epstein’s criminal activities when he went to jail in 2008, and this I take full ownership of.

To wrap up – while I regret ever taking any money from Jeffrey Epstein and not doing more research in the 2008 timeframe to understand better the nature of his horrifying activities, the bottom line is my relationship with him was very simple and was just about me repeatedly seeking AGI research money from a very rich person and occasionally obtaining small bits of it. It is now clear Epstein was a monster and an utter asshole – and his focus on centralizing power in himself was the exact opposite of what I’m after with my current work on decentralizing AGI and building an open and transparent Singularity. However, Epstein did recognize the value and importance of AGI well before the scientific or business mainstream, which is what led me into the funder-fundee relationship with him that feels so super unfortunate in hindsight.