Unlike all life before us, humanity's ascent is a story of ingenuity, not just biological evolution. Our progress has been driven by the curiosity to acquire knowledge, the ability to pass it on, and an intrinsic drive to innovate. We build technology which gives us leverage beyond our biology.
We stand at the top of a knowledge and technology colossus that we collectively created over the past ten thousand generations. Scientific progress has helped us overcome burdens that long defined human life — famines, plagues, and widespread illiteracy. Science will continue to redefine the boundaries of the human condition.
Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination.
Current deep learning-based AI, while impressive and economically valuable, is ultimately constrained by its inability to efficiently learn and adapt. It excels at known tasks but crumbles when faced with open-ended problems. It reflects back to us only the knowledge, programs, and abstractions found in its training data. Like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, it hides the fact that human general intelligence created the training data.
If AI cannot efficiently adapt, it is forever constrained by what humans teach it. To compress the next 100 years of scientific progress into 50, or perhaps 10, we need general intelligence, not task-specific skill. We need computers that can pose problems and explore new territory, not just apply known solutions. We need computers that can innovate.
The path to AGI is not through incremental improvements to existing methods. The problems with deep learning are fundamental and cannot be addressed superficially. It's time for a new paradigm. The good news is that we know what it is: program synthesis.
We believe program synthesis holds the key to unlocking AGI. Instead of interpolating between data points in a continuous embedding space, program synthesis searches for discrete programs, or models, that perfectly explain observed data. This allows it to achieve much greater generalization power with extreme data-efficiency, requiring only a few examples to learn.
By leveraging deep learning to guide program search, we can overcome the computational bottlenecks of program synthesis. This fusion integrates intuitive pattern recognition with rigorous reasoning, enabling autonomous abstraction and skill acquisition from minimal data.
Compared to deep learning, program synthesis is a much less mature research field. The state of program synthesis in 2025 looks a lot like deep learning circa 2012. But we are not alone in recognizing the potential of program synthesis — it's a technique every frontier AI lab is now starting to explore. Most, however, believe it's only a small component of what's needed for AGI. We believe program synthesis and deep learning are equally important.
We are at the crest of a pivotal moment in scientific history and the world deserves every possible direct, unique attempt to build AGI.
We're starting Ndea — an AI research and science lab. The name - like 'idea' with an 'n' - is inspired by the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), capturing our first goal to merge deep learning with program synthesis.
Ndea is entirely focused on developing and operationalizing AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress in our lifetime for the benefit of all current and future generations.
Building AGI alone is a monumental undertaking, but our mission is even bigger. We're creating a factory for rapid scientific advancement — a factory capable of inventing and commercializing N ideas.
From our vantage point today, we see many 'known' frontiers like self-driving vehicles, drug discovery, sustainable energy, robotics, and space exploration. While AGI will benefit all of these, the most exciting adventure lies in the 'unknown'. AGI promises discoveries and progress we cannot imagine today.
As with all great endeavors into the unknown, our chance of success is low, but not zero. We are driven by the belief that AGI is the key to unlocking unprecedented scientific progress and human flourishing.
To realize our vision, we're building the world's most talent-dense program synthesis team.