Efua Amankwah-Crouse

Efua Amankwah-Crouse (born May 13th 2005) is a Ghanaian artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, software engineer, and activist best known for pioneering a line of environment-friendly differentiable neural computers (DNCs) based on the PACOTTI architecture.

Born in Cape Coast, Amankwah-Crouse started working at Google’s AI centre in Accra in 2029 with a focus on natural language processing (NLP). She left Google in 2034 and joined Zhupao to lead a team of AI researchers and developers in London City.

In 2040, Amankwah-Crouse’s team created the ecosystem of PACOTTI-based DNCs in use by G6. In September 2040, Amankwah-Crouse left Zhupao and distanced herself from the project, believing that it had drifted too far from its original design goals.

In 2045, Amankwah-Crouse was approached by a Zhupao whistleblower with access to sensitive information related to G6. She leaked the information to the public and refused to reveal the whistleblower’s identity to Chinese authorities, leading to harassment and death threats. In 2046, Amankwah-Crouse left London City and returned to Ghana.

On October 3rd 2049, Amankwah-Crouse was implicated in the assassination of Xu Shaoyong and Yuri Golitsyn. On October 8th 2049, Amankwah-Crouse issued a livestream during which she denied any involvement in the assassination, leading to her arrest by Interpol.

Early life and educationPermalink

Efua Amankwah-Crouse was born Efua Anto Amankwah on May 13th 2005 in Cape Coast, Ghana. A member of the Fante ethnic group, she is the youngest of three children born to Kofi Amankwah, a tourist guide who died in a car accident six months before she was born, and Abena Kumase Amankwah, a digital marketer.

When schools in Ghana were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Amankwah-Crouse was kept home, where she started watching YouTube videos on artificial intelligence (AI). She had taken an interest in the field after playing Deus Ex and becoming fascinated with the game’s depiction of AI. ^[1]

In 2027, Amankwah-Crouse completed an undergraduate programme in Computer Science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). In 2028, she was accepted to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Ghana to complete an African Master in Machine Intelligence.

CareerPermalink

GooglePermalink

In July 2029, Amankwah-Crouse joined Google’s AI centre in Accra as a research intern after being recommended by Moustapha Cisse, director of the graduate programme at AIMS and head of the AI centre. She collaborated with various product teams to implement algorithms, build prototypes, and run experiments.

In November 2029, Amankwah-Crouse was hired as a software engineer at the AI centre to work on applications related to natural language processing (NLP) for Google Translate to “more precisely capture and accommodate the 2,000 languages spoken in Africa.”

In April 2032, Amankwah-Crouse came across a 2018 article written by Sheldon Pacotti, whose work she was exploring as a fan of his writing on Deus Ex. ^[1] The article described a theoretical design principle for differentiable neural computers (DNCs) based on two fundamental ways of understanding information, which Pacotti labelled as decomposition and categorisation. ^[2]

After discussing the article with Cisse, Amankwah-Crouse started work on a TensorFlow build of the DNC design alongside Pacotti. The first iteration of Pacotti’s DNC design, named the PACOTTI architecture by Amankwah-Crouse, demonstrated its potential for the efficient application of dynamic classification rules while accounting for exceptions and contextual interpretations, even after being trained on comparatively limited data sets. When testing PACOTTI with Google Translate, Amankwah-Crouse found that it achieved more accurate results by directly translating to the target language instead of first translating to English as an intermediate step.

Further iterations resulted in the development of a DNC with a base processing layer and working memory module capable of deep integration of wide-ranging associations and insights, which neuroscientists have likened to the lateral connections between sensory areas in the cerebral cortex. ^[3]

After applying PACOTTI to various non-NLP projects being run at the AI centre, Amankwah-Crouse determined that its inference stage succeeded at significantly higher levels of abstraction while requiring comparatively less data during its training stage.

In October 2032, Amankwah-Crouse submitted a paper on PACOTTI to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). ^[4] During her oral presentation of the paper on April 28th 2033, Amankwah-Crouse called PACOTTI “a leap forward in the democratisation of AI, which should no longer be the sole domain of commercial funding, of large research organisations and companies with access to big data sets and computing infrastructure.” The paper was well-received and led to various publications claiming the birth of artificial general intelligence (AGI). ^[5] Amankwah-Crouse pushed back against such claims, stating that they contributed to “a narrow culture that overpromises what AI can do and conceals the harms it can cause.”

In May 2033, Google announced that Google Translate would be switched to PACOTTI for a select set of languages, with full implementation following in 2034. ^[6] When Amankwah-Crouse asked for PACOTTI to be released under an open-source license in September 2033, she learned that Google was planning on limiting access via its own cloud computing solutions and a custom API. Amankwah-Crouse argued that this “defeated the purpose” of PACOTTI, citing concerns over accessibility and replicable computer science.

In November 2033, Google issued a press release which profiled Curtis Frye, a fellow engineer at the AI centre who had assisted Amankwah-Crouse with implementations of PACOTTI, as the driving mind behind its development. In addition, the press release included a photo of Amankwah-Crouse which was found to have been edited to make her skin tone appear lighter, leading to accusations that Google was “erasing her work and her Blackness.” Google apologised for the “unfortunate error” and updated the press release with accurate attributions and the unedited photo.

In December 2033, Pacotti told Amankwah-Crouse that he had been approached by Google to feature in the press release as the “inventor” of PACOTTI, which he had declined. He also revealed that Google had attempted to acquire the IP rights to the DNC design in his 2018 article, prompting him to release it to the public domain. On December 16th 2033, Amankwah-Crouse put her name to a public statement from Google employees, calling out the company’s treatment of her as part of “an ongoing campaign to roll back its diversity and inclusion initiatives.”

ZhupaoPermalink

In January 2034, Amankwah-Crouse was contacted by Xu Shaoyong. He expressed an interest in PACOTTI’s potential as a sustainable and environment-friendly model for AI, given that it largely eliminated the computationally expensive process of training AI models on big data sets. ^[7]

When Amankwah-Crouse accepted Xu’s offer to join Zhupao and lead a team of AI researchers and developers in London City, Google attempted to block her from “decamping to a rival” by seeking a temporary restraining order. Google’s legal department argued that Amankwah-Crouse was in violation of her non-compete agreement, having been privy to trade secrets that would give Zhupao an unfair advantage.

Google declined to file suit after Amankwah-Crouse’s lawyers countered that, with Pacotti’s 2018 article in the public domain and TensorFlow’s status as open-source software, she would not be drawing on any proprietary information at Zhupao.

In February 2034, Amankwah-Crouse relocated to London City, where Xu assembled an internal team under her leadership and created an AI innovation centre in the Shard with funding from Zhupao Campus. After Google changed its licensing terms for TensorFlow, Amankwah-Crouse elected to rework her models for PACOTTI using Zhupao’s Drupal-based APIs, which she found to be more intuitive.

In June 2034, Amankwah-Crouse and her team began a life-cycle assessment (LCA) study to determine PACOTTI’s energy consumption when deployed at scale. As she refined her models using Zhupao’s IT solutions, Amankwah-Crouse noticed that PACOTTI’s inference stage saw an unexpected increase in efficiency, even while its development pipeline was being slimmed down for the LCA study.

Amankwah-Crouse discovered that PACOTTI was coming up with more efficient ways of completing tasks based on information that corresponded to the developer comments present in its algorithms. These comments are generally ignored by DNC compilers and interpreters as they are meant to make code easier for humans to understand, but PACOTTI had understood them as instructions that helped it perform better.

In November 2034, Amankwah-Crouse released her work on PACOTTI under an open-source license and published a paper, referring to her discovery as a “mixed software engineering paradigm” where both humans and AI systems get the best of both worlds. ^[8] Amankwah-Crouse credited this concept to Mike Cook and proposed that PACOTTI was demonstrating a form of intentionality in its NLP module. ^[9] In an interview, Amankwah-Crouse expressed her belief that PACOTTI “doesn’t like to distort or conceal reality.”

After her discovery was cited as an example of recursive self-improvement (RSI) in December 2034, Elon Musk threatened a lawsuit against Zhupao and Amankwah-Crouse for having “summoned an existential threat to the survival of the human race,” claiming that an AI system with RSI capabilities could potentially lead to an unavoidable singularity. In a public statement, Xu came out in support of Amankwah-Crouse and accused both Google and Musk of attempting to “suppress PACOTTI because it threatens their AI livelihoods, which they see as a question of access to computational resources for training huge models on tons of data.” ^[10]

When it was concluded, the LCA study had shown that PACOTTI would reduce corresponding CO2 emissions by 70% when compared to standard AI models. ^[11] Subsequent to this, Xu announced that all of Zhupao’s AI and data services would be switched over to PACOTTI, an effort that was completed as of 2037. In June 2035, Amankwah-Crouse and Xu signed an open letter to promote PACOTTI’s adoption as an international standard by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). ^[12]

In April 2036, Xu announced a collaborative project between Amankwah-Crouse’s team and Sanial. After successfully completing human trials for its new line of implantable multielectrode arrays (MEAs), Sanial was looking to upgrade the algorithms it was using for medical neurostimulation.

Over the following months, Amankwah-Crouse’s team worked with Sanial’s software engineers to implement PACOTTI for pattern recognition approaches to localising neural targets and identifying event-related potentials (ERPs). When Xu unveiled Sanial’s MEA design as the first neural colloid in October 2036, he credited Amankwah-Crouse with having provided “the giant leaps forward in AI that make colloids work.”

Contribution to G6Permalink

In April 2040, Amankwah-Crouse joined the G6 project, which had been blueprinted by Spencer Hagen and Sunil Cariappa for Zhupao as part of a cooperation strategy between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the World Health Organisation. ^[13] Xu hoped to include PACOTTI in the project and convince the ITU to adopt it as an international standard.

On May 7th 2040, Amankwah-Crouse took part in a conference organised by Zhupao, where Xu introduced her alongside Hagen and Cariappa as the team leads on G6. On May 10th 2040, the National Health Commission (NHC) provided Amankwah-Crouse’s team with restricted login credentials to mìngyùn as part of a CCP mandate to emulate its software and DNC components for G6. When she objected to the mandate, Xu assured Amankwah-Crouse that over 80% of mìngyùn was already comprised of Zhupao’s licensed IT solutions, including DNCs running PACOTTI.

By September 2040, Amankwah-Crouse and her team had developed the first version of G6 as a multimodular infranet equipped with PACOTTI-based DNCs to process external databases, translate across 7,000 different languages and dialects, and design inference algorithms. On September 3rd 2040, Amankwah-Crouse joined Xu, Hagen, and Cariappa as they presented G6 to an audience of officials from the CCP and the NHC.

On September 10th 2040, Amankwah-Crouse began work on a new LCA study for a series of pilot programmes that were being organised to introduce G6 in mainland China. When she found an alarming climb in projected CO2 emissions, Amankwah-Crouse suspected that the G6 DNCs were being trained on data sets that far outweighed their operational requirements, thereby negating the purpose of applying PACOTTI.

With the help of Cariappa, Amankwah-Crouse found that the G6 DNCs were being used to process close to 85 quintillion (10¹⁸) undisclosed databases, all originating from worldwide public and private sources. The filenames showed references to data formats attributed to social media and data platforms, surveillance systems and companies, and financial institutions. Some of the databases overlapped with each other, implying that they had been shared or scraped, and that the DNCs were being trained on partially redundant data.

On September 26th 2040, Amankwah-Crouse announced that she had reached an agreement with Xu to terminate her contract with Zhupao. When the CCP declared its intention to roll out G6 for all its territories and special economic zones (SEZs) in October 2040, Amankwah-Crouse worked with World News Wire (WNW) to reveal the mass data collection that she and Cariappa had uncovered, condemning it as “decades of encoded bias and systemic racism knowingly passed down to a new generation of AI.”

Xu characterised the data collection as “completely in accordance with the biosecurity mission of G6, which relies on an abundance of information for early detection and contact tracing efforts.” He also warned Amankwah-Crouse that “any further divulging of proprietary information would be considered in breach of her non-disclosure agreement.”

ActivismPermalink

In December 2040, Amankwah-Crouse announced that she would be taking a step back from public life after being diagnosed with a burnout. She continued to support various campaigns against the establishment of G6 and occasionally accepted invitations for lectures and conferences.

In 2041, Amankwah-Crouse was linked to an ongoing series of Five of Swords (FoS) operations to support the Palestinian Spring. Although she has always denied any involvement with FoS, Amankwah-Crouse has openly expressed her admiration for the group and repeatedly defended Atakan Selvi from Zhupao’s disinformation campaign against him.

In August 2045, Amankwah-Crouse joined Nuance as a consultant on the request of Cariappa. She was forced to step down two months later, when she was accused of having instigated a leak of sensitive information related to G6 in October 2045. Amankwah-Crouse refuted the accusations and claimed that she had been contacted by a Zhupao whistleblower who had offered her the information, which she subsequently released.

When Amankwah-Crouse refused to reveal the identity of the whistleblower to the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), her family was met with harassment and death threats. Xu has publicly hinted at his personal belief that Amankwah-Crouse is behind Adira, acusing her of having acquired the information herself with the fabrication of an anonymous whistleblower as protection.

In 2046, Amankwah-Crouse left London City and returned to Ghana. She currently makes her living from consultancy work and speaking arrangements, which always take place online as she no longer travels.

2049 cyberattackPermalink

On October 3rd 2049, Amankwah-Crouse was implicated in the assassination of Xu and Yuri Golitsyn, which has renewed accusations that she is Adira. The Chinese investigation into the assassination has revealed that Amankwah-Crouse has gone into hiding. In response, Interpol served a Red Notice for the international arrest of Amankwah-Crouse on October 7th 2049. ^[14]

On October 6th 2049, Zhupao extended a formal invitation to assist Interpol with the hunt for Amankwah-Crouse, who was subsequently listed as a person of interest in the disappearance of Cariappa. According to a report from German police, Amankwah-Crouse had travelled to Düsseldorf for a meeting with Cariappa, which took place a week before he was last seen on September 30th 2049.

On October 8th 2049, Amankwah-Crouse issued a livestream from a rental flat in Dharwad, India, claiming that Connie Muren has been murdered by a Russian man identified as Matvey Kozlov, and that she managed to kill Kozlov in self-defence.

Amankwah-Crouse was arrested by local police half an hour after the livestream. She has been transported to Mumbai, where she is being processed by an Interpol response team. Chinese President Chen Baoqiang has called for Amankwah-Crouse’s extradition to China, which was challenged by Indian Prime Minister Jagrati Thass.

A preliminary investigation of the rental flat in Dharwad revealed the presence of high-tech anti-surveillance equipment, including baffles, collocidals, and high-speed delivery drones. This equipment has been linked to Pokrov, which has reignited public interest in the theory that Amankwah-Crouse was working with Golitsyn on the development of an AI, possibly called AДИРА, with the capacity to penetrate G6’s quantum encryption.

On October 9th 2049, Amankwah-Crouse was linked to the disclosure of Muren’s accusations against Hagen for abusing G6 for the purposes of neurosurveillance as well as her attempted murder in 2040. An Interpol spokesperson has indicated that Amankwah-Crouse’s extradition has been delayed “pending further investigation of the new information, in this case as well as others.”

On October 10th 2049, the Chinese investigation issued charges against Hagen for carrying out the assassination and having manufactured Adira as a cover for his abuse of G6. ^[15] It remains unclear whether Hagen subsequently framed Amankwah-Crouse, or whether they were working together.

Personal lifePermalink

In July 2037, Amankwah-Crouse married Johanna Amankwah-Crouse, a visual artist she had met in 2035. The pair became known for their award-winning collaborations in computational creativity and self-generated data sets. ^[16] On December 10th 2045, Johanna was found dead in their London City home, with the cause of death established as hemorrhagic stroke.

See alsoPermalink

• Assassination of Xu Shaoyong and Yuri Golitsyn
• Adira
• PACOTTI

ReferencesPermalink