Beginnings can be awkward! It is strange staring at a totally blank space like this and thinking of many interesting future topics and developments I will want to share… but you have to start with a very first step… So let’s keep this simple!
I want to introduce to you Taos Research Corporation (taosresearch.ai).
First why the name Taos? I grew up in the beautiful state of New Mexico, and have in my veins a deep connection to the land and wonderful mix of cultures found there. Taos is a town of under 7,000 people in northern New Mexico with an almost mythical spirituality and beauty, not to mention one of the best ski areas in the world. While our family’s home was in Albuquerque, I spent a lot of time in Taos and other parts of northern New Mexico growing up. It is in my soul.
The goal of Taos Research is to focus on cross disciplinary research in AI, and the basic sciences (including both hard and social sciences). Inter and cross disciplinary thinking is really at the absolute core of what motivated the founding of a new organization. The spiritual and philosophical meaning of a place like Taos to me personally serves to emphasize my belief that we need more philosophy, and more connection to the awesome beauty and inspiring complexity of nature in our research. Taos helps sum that up for me. It keeps me grounded to think of the example of the beauty of Taos and it’s broader meaning.
Today research is often extremely specialized, and it is very rare for researchers in corporations or in academia to have time to reach out to other disciplines. Often the challenge just to keep pace with one’s own sub area of specialization is overwhelming. Many of our largest challenges today in basic sciences, as well as in society stem from large complex adaptive systems. The Santa Fe Institute (www.santafe.edu) has been a pioneer in advancing complexity science, the study of complex adaptive systems. Understanding these systems will be essential to addressing the challenges humanity faces on the road ahead, and I believe to do so will require radical new efforts to increase our cross disciplinary understanding… not just to stay in our subfields and make progress there. I like to think of Taos Research as a new sibling organization to the Santa Fe institute, and over time I may try to build greater ties there.
I would like Taos to be an information source, and an organization, that helps people in multiple ares of inquiry to see connections in other fields. On a human level, I’ll also be working to make connections between people whether for business or for intellectual inquiry. In an age of AI, nothing is more sacred and valuable than our human connections.
Taos is also a for profit corporation. Concretely we develop and contribute to platform software and tools in the open source that we believe can help advance science and human understanding. We also plan to devote approximately 50% of our time annually to work with researchers in non profit areas in academia, policy, or other organizations. On the for profit side we work with venture capitalists, large organizations and start-ups on cutting edge research and projects that involve a heavy dose of AI as well as other disruptive technologies.
Please join us as we will try to provide insights and cross disciplinary connections not found elsewhere! On our website we also aggregate publications, papers and books that we have found especially valuable. If you are interested in working with us as an independent researcher or on commercial projects, or if you are interested in engaging us professionally, please reach out.
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