Suspected Assassin of Insurance CEO Studied Artificial Intelligence, Spoke of "Singularity"

Sleuth Serum

As the internet continues to pore over the extensive online presence of Luigi Mangione, who has been arrested as the prime suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, his many interests are erratic and sometimes contradictory.

One unexpected puzzle piece: According to his still public LinkedIn profile, Mangione studied AI during his undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania.

The data engineer even spent much of the summer of 2019 teaching pre-collegiate students at Stanford University about AI. According to the profile, he "designed lesson plans and taught artificial intelligence to gifted high school students."

Stanford later told Reuters that somebody by the same name was employed as a "head counselor" at the time.

Even before receiving higher education, Mangione talked about AI in a speech to parents at his high school graduation ceremony.

"We may have been born into one of the most exciting times on earth, regardless of the singularity," he said at the time. "We might not recognize it in our day to day lives, but the world is changing fast."

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But whether his recently terminated career as a data engineer for a used car sales website or his short-lived stint as an AI teaching assistant have anything to do with his motivations to murder Thompson is tough to say.

What looks like a far more likely explanation is his years-long battle with chronic back pain, which may have turned him against the health insurance industry and eventually led toward the assassination.

What's also unclear is how Mangione feels about generative AI, given the current state of the tech today. His X-formerly-Twitter account is full of posts about public figures, including podcaster Joe Rogan, Edward Snowden, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In short, it's a muddy portrait of a 26-year-old Ivy League college graduate, whose idiosyncratic outbursts range from saying that porn should be regulated "no less than" tobacco and that sex toys should be banned.

According to posts he retweeted in 2022, Mangione was initially swept up in the growing excitement surrounding new AI technologies, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and image generators like Dall-E, but has since appeared annoyed by tweets that were generated by an AI.

Whether he was clued into the algorithms being used by UnitedHealth to deny healthcare coverage for elderly patients, however, remains unclear.

The company was sued last year over allegedly using an AI algorithm to deny claims to some patients that had already been approved by their doctors.

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