| Founders Fund and Dustin Moskovitz’s Good Technology and Peter Thiel have led a $15 million round in a company that is trying to replicate the intelligence of the human brain in software. Vicarious’ goal is to help humanity thrive by inventing the algorithm to create to intelligent machines. |
Vicarious wants to build a series of algorithms that mimic the way the mammalian brain processes and applies information — in short it wants to build software that will grant computers intelligence. The first concrete product the Union City, California-based startup aims to build is a human-like object recognition system, but this is something that co-founder and CTO Dileep George, formerly with Jeff Hawkin's Numenta, estimates is three to four years away.
CEO and Co-Founder D. Scott Phoenix explains that the company isn’t focused on commercialization anytime soon as a means to preserve the research into building a truly robust set of intelligence algorithms, as opposed to an industry specific algorithm that leads to limited artificial intelligence — some kind of idiot savant. “We will continue working on solving the core problem.” Phoenix says. “I think it has held back AI when others have tried and found something that works well in a particular domain and then they refine that. Then the tech gets more narrow over time.”
Ultimately, Phoenix says the technology could be used in “almost every industry,” including robotics, medical image analysis, and image and video search,. But that’s a ways off — Phoenix and his co-founder George say they’re still deep in research and development, and that the funding will be used to expand those R&D efforts. Developing products that commercialize the technology is still several years off, George says.
Building computer hardware or software modeled on the human brain is the kind of big tech problem that Peter Thiel, a former PayPal executive and a partner with Founders Fund has called on entrepreneurs to do. This is another example of how Thiel is one of the key figures in the Singularity movement.
In an interview last year, George made the bold claim that artificial intelligence has the potential “to be bigger than the Internet.”
The realization of these advances is still a ways off, though. George predicts that AI will revolutionize robotics in 10 years, while “real human-like intelligence” is still 15 years off. George's predictions align with Ray Kurzweil's that we’ll achieve artificial intelligence by 2029.
I posted the following to kurzweilai forum:
ReplyDeleteI suppose everyone read the other day (forget who posted it) that Vicarious -- the new A.I. company trying to produce software that learns, based on advanced algorithms and insights gleaned from neuroscience (e.g. the ideas of Jeff Hawkins) -- got Series A startup funding to the tune of 15 million dollars.
Did that strike anyone as strange? Did that sound way out of profile for a small company like that?
I don't know much about Series A funding, but based on the following wiki article, 15 million sounds like a lot of money for a small software company:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_A_round
And what that makes me suspect is that the "show and tell" to funders must have gone really well. I'm guessing that they already have some kind of neural network that does image recognition (and perhaps more general types of learning) that is far beyond what anyone else has been able to achieve. And, in fact, there is some more evidence for this: I remember Dileep George making some comment like the following during his talk at the last Singularity Summit (paraphrasing from memory), "When you stack layers of neural networks, you get diminishing returns in performance. We, on the other hand, have been able to achieve MULTIPLICATIVE returns."
What I'm wondering is: why would they need 15 million dollars? I mean, software engineers aren't THAT expensive. Maybe they need it to buy hardware -- lots of computers to test theories and such.
star0,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this. Maybe you are on to something with the show and tell theory. It will be very interesting to see what Vicarious eventually rolls out.
33rd Square