This Peter Thiel guy is everywhere.
"the general attitude to the subject in the AI community around 2007: “If you talked to anybody about general AI, you would be considered at best eccentric, at worst some kind of delusional, nonscientific character.” lol
https://gcrinstitute.org/papers/055_agi-2020.pdf
Are CS and math only two routes to get into this field ?
PS: My kid talked to one physics professor who coworks as research scientist (at Google?). He said some stanford AGI guys work 7 days/week. Superstars in field of physics (mainly at schools) do contribute more than other people compared with top people in AI (mainly in industry).
There are about 3-4 AGI research groups in a few top tier companies (Google Meta MSFT OpenAI?) formed by mainly physicists. Those groups like to hire physicists. Other groups are more CS/Math people.
AGI is like physics 100 years ago.