Embee's Shortform

Pet peeve: AI community defaulted to von Neumann as being the ultimate smart human and therefore the basis of all ASI/human intelligence comparison when the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck exists somehow.

Von Neumann arguably had the highest processor-type "horsepower" we know of plus his breadth of intellectual achievements is unparalleled.
But imo Grothendieck is a better comparison point for ASI as his intelligence, while being strangely similar to LLMs in some dimensions, arguably more closely resembles what alien-like intelligence would be: 
- solving "impossible" problem through meta-language and abstractions. 
- able to think deeply on his own (re-discovered measure theory alone when he was a teenager, re-discovered Poincaré results when undergrad, apparently solved multiple PhD theses in parallel in less than a year)
- almost solely built algebraic geometry (which in turn provided the blueprint for category theory) a domain which scares a part of the mathematics community to this day. 
- not your typical child prodigy 
- famously bad at computations: "take a prime number. 57 for instance."

Even from the AI alignment perspective, Grothendieck is fascinating.
Unaligned with "society" incentives and rewards yet having strong moral preferences, in the sense of choosing to work for a public university when he probably could have earned a higher wage elsewhere, holding hardcore communist beliefs, refusing the Fields medal in protest of Soviet Union and on top of that chosing to be stateless.
Disappeared the moment he understood that despite all of that his discoveries were still fueling the industrial-military complex.