Twenty-three years ago, pioneers in artificial intelligence received an invitation to a Caribbean conference funded by “some rich guy.”
Now there is dismay among those who attended the three-day St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium in the U.S. Virgin Islands in April 2002 — because that “rich guy” was Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later convicted as a child sex offender who faced federal sex trafficking charges when he killed himself in 2019.
Amid swirling scandal, as President Donald Trump resists calls to release FBI files on his former close friend, two participants in the St. Thomas symposium told Raw Story what they remembered, having never before discussed the event with the media.
Another two attendees shared memories of the symposium via email.
“It was very disturbing when I first discovered that there was that connection, and I wish it had never happened,” said Benjamin Kuipers, a computer scientist who retired from the University of Michigan last year.
Symposium attendees said they did not witness illegal activity or have concerns about children in Epstein’s presence.
“When the Epstein thing all hit the fan, people would say … ‘Everybody had to know,’” said Mary Shepherd, 75, an owner of machine-reasoning AI company Cycorp who attended the meeting with her late husband and cofounder, Doug Lenat.
‘And I'm like, No, everybody didn't have to know, because I didn't know that this was going on.”
The symposium took place on St. Thomas, but Shepherd and Kuipers recalled visiting Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, two miles away.
Kuipers remembered a banquet on the beach. An attendee who declined to be named said via email they remembered being “taken by boat to a beach on [Epstein’s] island for a bbq. We were not taken to any buildings on the island.”
Kuipers said: “As far as I know, being on Jeffrey Epstein's Island was a one-off. We were brought there for the banquet, and then brought back.”
Shepherd remembered going to the island on a boat sent by Epstein for her and Lenat, and MIT cognitive and computer scientist Marvin Minsky, who died in 2016, and his wife, Gloria Rudisch Minsky.
“Because the sea was a little rough, as soon as I got there, I needed to use the ladies room, so I went inside to use it, and Ghislaine Maxwell [Epstein’s associate and former girlfriend]was in the room that I had to walk through to get to the bathroom, and there were two girls there who I assumed were her children,” Shepherd told Raw Story.
Shepherd said she thought the teenage girls were Maxwell’s children “because of the way they were interacting,” which Shepherd compared to when “your mom was giving you instructions.”
In 2022, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for sex trafficking and other charges related to Epstein’s abuse of teenage girls.
Amid the current Epstein scandal, Maxwell is at the center of considerable attention. Last Friday, after giving a prison interview to Todd Blanche, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, Maxwell was transferred from Florida to a minimum security facility in Texas.
“Things just did not seem right,” Shepherd said. “There was a lot of security. There was just a really strange vibe when I was there.”
Shepherd said she told her husband she was “not comfortable here,” and they left with Minsky and his wife to return to St. Thomas.
Shepherd said she didn’t report anything from her visit because “it was just a feeling.”
She and Lenat declined a Cycorp investment from Epstein. She did not recall the amount.
“Epstein had been considering investing in our company, and I said, ‘Doug, I don't like him. There's something wrong with him. I don't like him. He's a wheeler-dealer, and he's not the kind of person we want to be representing our technology,’ so we decided not to take his money.”
Shepherd recalled a conversation with her husband after Epstein was arrested in July 2019.
“It's like, ‘Wow, we really dodged that bullet,’” Shepherd said. “I'm really glad we got that feeling that he was skeevy because that would have been terrible. Terrible.”
During the symposium, Epstein “walk[ed] around like any sponsor of one of those things would,” Shepherd said.
Kuipers said: “It was clear he had a number of attractive young women around. Aside from just noticing that and thinking, ‘Well, that's rich guys for you,’ I really didn't have any sense that any of them were underage. Now, what that really means is it didn't occur to me to think about it.”
In August 2019, Slate reported that the AI theorist Roger Schank recalled Epstein walking into the symposium “with two girls on his arm.”
“[Epstein] was in the back, on a couch, hugging and kissing these girls,” said Schank, who died in 2023.
Neither Shepherd nor Kuipers remembered seeing Epstein hugging or kissing girls.
“I guess I had the impression that he had a number of assistants, and so they were functioning as assistants to him as he sort of hosted the conference,” Kuipers said.
“They were both at the conference itself in St. Thomas, and they were on the island. But, I mean, they were helping out, doing various things.”
“At the time, there were a variety of rich people who were interested in AI and would spend money to make this happen,” Kuipers said.
Epstein paid for accommodations and travel, offering rides on his jet, two attendees said.
Kuipers declined the ride since he was teaching at the University of Texas, Austin, so flying from New York “didn't make any sense at all.”
Aaron Sloman, 88, a philosopher and AI and cognitive researcher, attended the conference and co-authored a paper on the discussions. He told Raw Story via email Epstein paid for his travel from the U.K. He traveled on “a private plane owned by Epstein” to the island, he wrote.
“I think the accommodation provided by Epstein was lavish, though I can't remember details now,” said Sloman, citing memories “partly restricted by my slowly but steadily worsening dementia.”
The attendee who requested anonymity recalled staying in a “nice hotel” on St. Thomas.
Kuipers said: “Here was this rich guy, and he wanted to hold a conference … bringing together a whole bunch of people that I knew quite well, and we were talking about interesting things, and it was in the Virgin Islands ... so I figured, why not?
“Of course, a couple decades later, it became clear why not, but that was way in the future.”
Kuipers said the conference’s small size, with about 20 attendees, was appealing.
“The little ones tend to be particularly exciting because if you've got a bunch of people who are working on the same kind of stuff, then you can really spend a lot of time together, so I kind of felt like that was this,” Kuipers said.
“Clearly, news these days makes it pretty clear that there was a subtext going on. I was completely clueless.”
Kuipers said he didn’t remember spending time on St. Thomas beyond the conference days.
“We all spent a lot of time talking about how to solve these AI problems, and we had very compatible views,” Kuipers said. “We did go swimming. There’s a visual image of being on the beach and swimming in the water and enjoying that.”
Shepherd said she thought she and Lenat arrived a day early and stayed a day after the symposium.
“It's a beautiful island, and it’s almost like, ‘Oh, come to paradise for a meeting,’” she said.
Kuipers, Sloman and Shepherd all said the symposium did not have a significant impact on their work.
“I was actually somewhat disappointed because it had been built up as being this big deal, and it really wasn't,” Shepherd said.
Sloman said he didn’t remember if Epstein himself presented about AI or cognitive science.
“I think he was hoping to be able to use the new AI technology to extend/enhance his financial activities, though I don't recall that aspect being discussed,” Sloman wrote. “It could explain his motivation for spending so much money to bring people to the symposium.”
The attendee who requested anonymity described Epstein as “like an ADHD curious kid.”
“He was eccentric. If he had an interesting conversation with a scientist or liked them, he’d ask them what they would do if they had more funding,” the attendee wrote.
“Sometimes he’d ask a scientist a technical question, then would follow with a personal question, which I always found odd."
The same attendee said “Epstein had an interest in AI, believed it would grow in importance, and was very fond of Marvin Minsky.”
In a May 2016 deposition, unsealed in 2019, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre — who killed herself in April this year — alleged Maxwell directed her to have sex with Minsky, The Verge reported. Minsky’s widow told theNew York PostMinsky did not have sex with any girls.
“We were always together,” Rudisch said. “We didn’t stay at [Epstein’s] house or anything.”
Rudisch told the Post “none of” the girls at Epstein’s residences “seemed very young.”
“I’m a pediatrician, I think I would have noticed,” Rudisch said.
