For some time within the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized field in Abu Dhabi was thought-about the best chess participant on the planet. Its title was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer—a cupboard stuffed with industrial-grade processors and specifically designed chips, strung along with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the web.
At a time when chess was nonetheless the principle gladiatorial enviornment for competitors between people and AI, Hydra and its exploits had been briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker revealed a contemplative 5,000-word function about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “fearsome”; and chess publications lined its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grand masters.
True to kind as a monster, Hydra was additionally remoted and unusual. Other superior chess engines on the time—Hydra’s rivals—ran on unusual PCs and had been accessible for anybody to obtain. But the complete energy of Hydra’s 32-processor cluster might be utilized by just one individual at a time. And by the summer time of 2005, even the members of Hydra’s improvement crew had been struggling to get a flip with their creation.
That’s as a result of the crew’s patron—the then 36-year-old Emirati man who’d employed them and put up the cash for Hydra’s souped-up {hardware}—was too busy reaping his reward. On a web based chess discussion board in 2005, Hydra’s Austrian chief architect, Chrilly Donninger, described this benefactor as the best “computer chess freak” alive. “The sponsor,” he wrote, “loves to play day and night with Hydra.”
Under the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor would log in to on-line chess tournaments and, with Hydra, play as a human-computer crew. More usually than not, they might trounce the competitors. “He loved the power of man plus machine,” one engineer informed me. “He loved to win.”
Hydra finally received overtaken by different chess computer systems and was discontinued within the late 2000s. But zor_champ went on to change into one of the vital highly effective, least understood males on the planet. His actual title is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.
A bearded, wiry determine who’s virtually by no means seen with out darkish sun shades, Tahnoun is the United Arab Emirates’ nationwide safety adviser—the intelligence chief to one of many world’s wealthiest and most surveillance-happy small nations. He’s additionally the youthful brother of the nation’s hereditary, autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. But maybe most essential, and most bizarrely for a spymaster, Tahnoun wields official management over a lot of Abu Dhabi’s huge sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported final 12 months that he immediately oversees a $1.5 trillion empire—extra cash than simply about anybody on the planet.
In his private fashion, Tahnoun comes throughout as one-third Gulf royal, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder, and one-third Bond villain. Among his many, many enterprise pursuits, he presides over a sprawling tech conglomerate known as G42 (a reference to the guide The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, during which “42” is a super-computer’s reply to the query of “life, the universe, and everything”). G42 has a hand in all the things from AI analysis to biotechnology—with particular areas of power in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech. Tahnoun is fanatical about Brazilian jiujitsu and biking. He wears his sun shades even on the gymnasium due to a sensitivity to mild, and he surrounds himself with UFC champions and combined martial arts fighters.
According to a businessman and a safety guide who’ve met with Tahnoun, guests who make it previous his layers of loyal gatekeepers may get an opportunity to talk with him solely after biking laps with the sheikh round his personal velodrome. He has been recognized to spend hours in a flotation chamber, the guide says, and has flown well being guru Peter Attia into the UAE to supply steerage on longevity. According to a businessman who was current for the dialogue, Tahnoun even impressed Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s highly effective crown prince, to chop again on quick meals and be a part of him in a quest to dwell to 150.
https://www.wired.com/story/uae-intelligence-chief-ai-money/