Venture capitalist and hedge fund investor Peter Thiel announced Tuesday that he has co-founded growth stage venture fund Mithril Capital Management. The fund has a target of $1 billion and has raised $402 million to date, according to an SEC filing.

The widely watched battle between Jeopardy-playing supercomputer Watson and two of the game show’s human champions this week directed national attention to the otherwise relatively obscure corner of the programming world known as natural language processing. But while the limelight was fixed mostly on Watson’s creator, IBM, it’s clear Big Blue isn’t the only one [...]

The latest VC to join the ranks of speakers at TEDx Silicon Valley on Dec. 12 at Stanford University is Peter Thiel.

Thiel–who’s known for co-founding PayPal, the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management and the venture firm The Foundrs Fund–however will not be discussing his investment philosophy. Chances are, he also won’t talk about the New York Post, which last week wrote that Clarium is in danger of posting its second consecutive annual loss.

Instead, Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook and several other companies and is rated a master by the United States Chess Federation, according to his bio, plans to talk about the Singularity Institute, an organization he funds to research artificial intelligence.