AI & Tech
Matheny Built Proto-AI Using Adobe Servers Without Permission in 1990s
The Why Files
The Basement: Joseph Matheny | The Man Who Hacked Reality Before the Internet Existed
What was said
"I bet I could requisition this machine into the data center, tell them it's for something else, and let it run, and I could do my experiments down there. My indie goes back to Adobe. Goes into the data center and it's marked as a marketing machine."
Joseph Matheny revealed he secretly installed an SGI Indy workstation in Adobe's data center in the late 1990s, marking it as a marketing machine while actually training an early chatbot to scrape the internet and build a database using recommendation algorithms. Working at Adobe gave him access to dual DS3 connections, among the fastest internet speeds available at the time, which he used for nocturnal AI training sessions.
Verification status
Attributed speaker claim
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Source and context
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- Programme
- The Why Files
- Episode
- The Basement: Joseph Matheny | The Man Who Hacked Reality Before the Internet Existed
- Clip time
- 1:33:35
- Original source
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The Why Files