Startup company
Vicarious has received $40 million in funding for its Artificial Intelligence (AI) activities. This amount is on top of the $15 million the company received in funding in 2012. The recent funding underlines the industry’s interest in AI and comes on the heels of some big recent investments. In January of this year Google purchased DeepMind for $400 million.
The funding was provided by some big industry players. Operating under San Francisco, California-based VC Formation 8, investors included former PayPal and current Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Two and a Half Men star Ashton Kutcher. Others investing included Box CEO Aaron Levie.
Vicarious is attempting to establish solutions that function in a similar fashion to the human brain. The company’s website suggests it has already developed a system which interprets photographs and videos as humans do. The company was in the news in November last year for developing a system that could crack Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (or CAPTCHA) codes.
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