The Crypto Billionaire Betting $1 Billion To Build AI Based On The Human Brain

Follow Forbes Daily Briefing Ripple and Stellar founder Jed McCaleb wants to build AGI by studying how the brain learns—then translating those rules into AI. In a two-story brick office building in Emeryville, neuroscientists are making plans to fit mice with diminutive brain-computer interfaces to record patterns of neural activity while they perform basic tasks like navigating a maze. They hope to build a library of mouse brain states that reliably maps to specific perceptions and actions. Next comes translation: turning those findings into code—and, eventually, into a new kind of AI system built on the brain’s governing principles. They plan to run the experiments on mice, monkeys and even humans. If it works, it could become a flywheel: brain experiments inform new AI architectures and those suggest new hypotheses to test. Hovering over all of it is a science fiction-sounding ambition: using brain computer interfaces not just to read minds, but to write them. Researchers talk about “uploading” knowledge into the brain, inserting the image of an apple into someone’s thoughts, or directions to navigate a never-before-seen maze. It sounds like an idea pulled straight out of a William Gibson book. Jed McCaleb, who founded cryptocurrency projects Ripple and Stellar, is trying to bankroll it into reality. The Silicon Valley billionaire is committing $1 billion of his cryptocurrency fortune–worth about $3.9 billion by Forbes’ estimate–into building AI systems that achieve artificial general intelligence, or the threshold at which AI systems can perform tasks as well as humans. “Most effort and research… is going in one particular area—transformers,” McCaleb said. “[AI] would benefit by looking closer at the human brain.” He's funding the effort through his nonprofit Astera Institute, which has long had an AI focus, but recently zeroed in on brain-inspired approaches, prompting McCaleb’s nine-figure commitment. In doing so, Astera joins a slew of other funded-into-the-billions AI research ventures with no clear commercialization plan, including former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s SSI or Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus. The self-made son of a single mother in Arkansas, McCaleb fits the modern technologist billionaire mold: future-obsessed, capital-rich and impatient with playing it safe. His bets are not small. In addition to Astera Institute, where he has pledged $600 million towards neuroscience on top of the $1 billion AGI effort, he spends several days a week at Vast, his space company in southern California. Vast wants to replace the international space station, and Forbes first reported it has been fundraising at a $2 billion valuation. “Crypto was, in some sense, a big detour,” McCaleb says. “I’d been wanting to work on AI the whole time, but only really got the chance once I stepped back [from crypto]...I think AI is going to be the most transformative thing that humans ever create. So it’s the most compelling thing to work on.” Read the full story on Forbes: By Anna Tong https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/27/this-crypto-billionaire-wants-to-use-the-human-brain-as-a-blueprint-for-ai/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices