According to LinkedIn, Ingallinera has founded a series of startups and was most recently an advisor for the Carboncopies Foundation, a research organization studying whether the human brain can be scanned and simulated digitally.
Neither he nor other members of Frontier Valley responded to KQED’s requests for comment.
While his promotional video shares little detail about his background, it paints a picture of sluggish bureaucracy slowing down the country’s progress in developing competitive AI technology, including humanoid robots. In it, he claims that because this new city would be built on federal land, it would “have total independence from the surrounding Bay Area and the state of California, avoiding the failures of many previous governance structures.”
He urged the White House to transfer the 512-acre parcel from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Department of Defense. Neither federal agency responded to KQED’s requests for comment.
Gary Marcus, an AI expert, disagreed with Ingallinera’s characterization that red tape is holding back the development of humanoid robots and said the real bottleneck is software.
“That’s mostly a (very hard) software problem, not a hardware problem,” he wrote in an email to KQED. “Companies can utterly work on that to a fair degree without a lot of red tape.”
The city of Alameda is moving forward with its own mixed-use development on Alameda Point, adjacent to where Frontier Valley is proposing to build its city. It had planned to develop a portion of the former airstrip into a 158-acre open-space park that would be operated by the East Bay Regional Park District.
In an emailed statement, Sarah Henry, a spokesperson for the city of Alameda, told KQED that “no reasonable fact” supports a proposed declaration of a national security emergency at the site.
“The city is in full support of the VA facility and regional parks project, which will serve Bay Area veterans, residents and visitors for many decades to come,” she said.
