Artificial Intelligence  

Major investors including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Ashton Kutcher are joining Peter Thiel with a $40 million investment in Vicarious FPC, a stealthy artificial-intelligence company that has already turned heads with it's CAPTCHA-beating algorithms.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have just invested $40m in the company that recently announced their artificial intelligence could decipher CAPTCHAs.

Joining Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, whose Founders Fund targets cutting edge technology and Ashton Kutcher, actor and tech investor, also investing, Zuckerberg and Musk are also joined by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

A Facebook spokesman said Zuckerberg’s investment in Vicarious, which hasn’t been previously reported, is a personal one and does not reflect Facebook’s interest in using Vicarious software.

"Translate the neocortex into computer code and 'you have a computer that thinks like a person,'" says Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix. 'Except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep.'”

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According to Vicarious’s website, the company is developing “machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain."

"Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network.”

Company founder D. Scott Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal that if they are successful, Vicarious will have created "a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep".  Essentially they are trying to build a human neocortex in silico.

Phoenix said his aim was to create a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects but the textures associated with them. He said he hopes Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases and create cheap, renewable energy, as well as performing the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he said.

Vicarious, whose other co-founder was neuroscientist Dileep George, is a long way from accomplishing its goals. Phoenix says the company won’t make a profit anytime soon and it has said very little about how its technology works. It hasn’t even disclosed its exact address, for fear it might be the target of corporate espionage or hacking.

The investment parallel's other major funding announcements for artificial intelligence ventures, including IBM's spin-off of the Watson Group, a 2,000-employee division dedicated to developing its self-learning super-computer, numerous Google robotics and AI acquisitions and Facebook's creation of it's own AI Lab.




SOURCE  Wall Street Journal

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 Artificial Intelligence  

Artificial intelligence startup, Vicarious claims its AI algorithms achieve success rates up to 90% on modern CAPTCHAs, a test frequently used to test an entity's "human-ness."

Vicarious, a Peter Thiel funded startup developing artificial intelligence software, has announced that its algorithms can now reliably solve modern CAPTCHAs, including Google’s reCAPTCHA, the world’s most widely used test of a machine’s ability to act human.

A CAPTCHA scheme is considered broken if an algorithm is able to reach a precision of at least 1%. By leveraging core insights from machine learning and neuroscience, the Vicarious AI achieves success rates up to 90% on modern CAPTCHAs from Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Captcha.com, and others. This advancement renders text-based CAPTCHAs no longer effective as a Turing test.

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"Recent AI systems like IBM’s Watson and deep neural networks rely on brute force: connecting massive computing power to massive datasets. This is the first time this distinctively human act of perception has been achieved, and it uses relatively minuscule amounts of data and computing power. The Vicarious algorithms achieve a level of effectiveness and efficiency much closer to actual human brains", said Vicarious co-founder D. Scott Phoenix.

"Understanding how brain creates intelligence is the ultimate scientific challenge. Vicarious has a long term strategy for developing human level artificial intelligence, and it starts with building a brain-like vision system. Modern CAPTCHAs provide a snapshot of the challenges of visual perception, and solving those in a general way required us to understand how the brain does it", said Vicarious co-founder Dr. Dileep George.

Solving CAPTCHA is the first public demonstration of the capabilities of Vicarious’ Recursive Cortical Network (RCN) technology. Although still many years away, the commercial applications of RCN will have broad implications for robotics, medical image analysis, image and video search, and many other fields.

"We should be careful not to underestimate the significance of Vicarious crossing this milestone," said Facebook co-founder and board member Dustin Moskovitz. "This is an exciting time for artificial intelligence research, and they are at the forefront of building the first truly intelligent machines."


SOURCE  Vicarious

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