When dreaming of the day artificial intelligence achieves humanlike ability, former Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko says he’s always done so in the context of building real-world machines. “I want an AI superintelligence that can build us starships and Dyson spheres,” he told Fortune—the latter being a hypothetical sci-fi megastructure that would harness energy from a star.
While his dream is still a long way off, Eremenko is laying the groundwork. He has joined forces with former Google DeepMind researcher Aleksa Gordić and Adam Nagel, an engineering leader previously at Acubed, Airbus’s innovation center. Together, they have founded P-1 AI, which emerged from stealth today with a $23 million seed round led by Radical Ventures. Other investors include Village Global, Schematic Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau, along with notable angels such as Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI’s VP of new product explorations, Peter Welinder.
