In 2002, years before ChatGPT was a headline fixture or AI tools were reshaping entire industries, a small group of scientists gathered for a private meeting on a tropical island. Their goal was to figure out how to make machines think like humans. But the host they gathered under would become one of the most disgraced names in modern memory: Jeffrey Epstein.
This was the St Thomas Common Sense Symposium. On paper, it was a serious AI think tank led by Marvin Minsky, one of the most respected minds in the field. Alongside him were other luminaries like Pushpinder Singh, Aaron Sloman and Doug Lenat. But behind the scenes, Epstein was funding the event, coordinating flights, hosting dinner parties and lurking at the edges of each conversation.
Many of the ideas discussed at that symposium hinted at the tech we now see today. Interactive AI assistants. Systems that could guide you through life decisions. Conversations with computers that felt eerily human. The group even referenced Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, speculating about digital tutors that sound a lot like the tools we use now. In a strange way, they saw the future before the rest of the world did.
But context matters. And here, the context is chilling.
While scientists wrestled over how to give machines common sense, Epstein played host like a man who knew his money bought access. In some accounts, he floated in and out with young women on his arm. In others, he sat back and watched as the brightest minds debated the future. The bigger question is why so many let him stay in the room at all.
It’s uncomfortable to consider how many early-stage ideas in AI were shared under the roof of someone later exposed as a predator. It is even more uncomfortable to consider how rarely this moment in AI history is mentioned.
This wasn’t a conference funded by a neutral institution or a university lab. It was backed by someone whose wealth, connections and manipulation granted him a seat next to world-changing technology.
The irony is brutal. While those researchers imagined systems that could help people make smarter, more ethical decisions, they were enabling one of the least ethical actors in modern science history. Their ideas survived. Their work moved forward. But the setting they were born in should force us to ask harder questions.
What does it mean when the roots of AI, a field that now influences law, education, medicine and national security, were watered in private meetings held by someone like Epstein?
And how many other breakthroughs have similarly murky origins that no one’s willing to revisit?
Original reporting and full deep dive by WIRED's Steven Levy: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Forgotten AI Summit HERE