In a two-story brick office building in Emeryville, neuroscientists are making plans to fit mice with diminutive brain-computer interfaces to record patterns of neural activity while they perform basic tasks like navigating a maze. They hope to build a library of mouse brain states that reliably maps to specific perceptions and actions.

Next comes translation: turning those findings into code—and, eventually, into a new kind of AI system built on the brain’s governing principles. They plan to run the experiments on mice, monkeys and even humans.

If it works, it could become a flywheel: brain experiments inform new AI architectures and those suggest new hypotheses to test. Hovering over all of it is a science fiction-sounding ambition: using brain computer interfaces not just to read minds, but to write them. Researchers talk about “uploading” knowledge into the brain, inserting the image of an apple into someone’s thoughts, or directions to navigate a never-before-seen maze.

It sounds like an idea pulled straight out of a William Gibson book. Jed McCaleb, who founded cryptocurrency projects Ripple and Stellar, is trying to bankroll it into reality.

The Silicon Valley billionaire is committing $1 billion of his cryptocurrency fortune–worth about $3.9 billion by Forbes’ estimate–into building AI systems that achieve artificial general intelligence, or the threshold at which AI systems can perform tasks as well as humans.

“Most effort and........

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