Bryan Johnson, the CEO of anti-ageing company Blueprint, reportedly said that his vision of living forever goes through artificial intelligence (AI). In an interview, the tech entrepreneur who has invested millions of dollars and multiple years to reverse his ageing in efforts to increase longevity of life, highlighted that he was now shifting his focus from reducing ageing to not dying. For this, Johnson has reportedly created an AI system which knows everything about the entrepreneur.
Bryan AI Will Let Johnson Live Forever: Report
Obsessing over immortality is not a new thing for the entrepreneur turned influencer, who is known for following a very strict lifestyle and diet to not only reduce ageing but to reverse it. In an interview with Wired, Johnson opened up about his current focus on eternal existence, and how he was going to achieve that.
Johnson reportedly said that he is focused on “extending our lifespans to some unknown horizon.” He reportedly added that to achieve this, humans will have to move on from the current biological system (which is made up of the human body, including bones, muscles, and blood) to a computational system. To that end, the entrepreneur has created an AI system that he calls Bryan AI, the publication mentioned. While it is said to be in a very crude form, Johnson has fed the machine with every word that he has ever said.
In essence, Bryan AI was trained on the dataset of Johnson’s entire life experience, thoughts, and personality. By taking in this information, Johnson likely believes that Bryan AI would become, with the progression of AI technology, a digital replica of himself. Fans of the popular British show Black Mirror would remember this concept from the episodes Be Right Back and San Junipero.
While the aspiration itself is achievable on paper, in practicality, it comes across several technological hurdles. First, large language models (LLMs), can be trained on datasets, but they do not necessarily remember the data in the same form that they ingest it. This data is broken down to sub-sentence level and is tokenised. Then it is fed to the AI system. So, even if the system takes in all the data, when it reproduces it, that may not be similar to the persona of Johnson.
The AI system can still be trained on the entrepreneur’s personality during pre- and post-training processes. However, such complicated techniques to create an AI model in resemblance to another human to the point they embody their entire personality have not yet been done.
There is a third option: A persona can be created after the AI model and its frontend chatbot have been created. This is similar to the Meta AI personas, Gemini’s Gems, or OpenAI’s GPTs. But that version would be a very superficial integration of a person, as we have seen from numerous Character.ai chatbots.
As per the Wired interview, Johnson does acknowledge that technology is not at the point where he can embed his brain and personality onto an AI system; however, he says, “As the technology gets better and better, the most prized asset is going to be existence.” Interestingly, and perhaps somewhat related, the entrepreneur is also planning to sell his anti-ageing startup to focus on a new philosophical path and religion dubbed “Don’t Die.”
