Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Ashton Kutcher invested in artificial intelligence developer Vicarious FPC. The total sum of investments was $40 million.

Vicarious

The founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, the co-owner of Tesla Motors and SpaceX Elon Musk, and a popular actor and venture investor Ashton Kutcher invested $40 million into the company Vicarious, which studies the structure of the cerebral cortex and tries to recreate it in the computer code.

It is the second-largest investment in the company for the past two years. In the first round, the Vicarious FPC received investment from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Facebook co-founder Dan Moskowitz.

This time, the company created a system of intelligent image recognition based on the functions of the human brain.

Company’s SEO Scott Phoenix notes that the result of their work will be a computer that will perceive the world and “think like a human, but it will not have to sleep and eat.” Such a project, according to experts, can take decades.

The company recently announced the development of a Facebook facial recognition system called DeepFace, which involves artificial intelligence technology. The accuracy of the algorithm was 97.25%, which is almost equal to the accuracy of facial recognition by a human.

Cleverbot

Vicarious is not the only company that aims to develop artificial intelligence. In 2011, Cleverbot, a computer with artificial intelligence developed by Rollo Carpenter, successfully passed the Turing Test.

It showed that it was capable of holding a conversation with the participants of the experiment so that 59% of them could not distinguish it from the human.

The Turing test, invented in the 50s by Alan Turing, a British computer expert, is a written conversation between a computer and a human.

This time, in order to complicate the test, it involved people who pretended to be “chat robots”.
As Rollo Carpenter explains, the algorithm of the Cleverbot is based on something like “speaking Wikipedia”.

Since 1997, when Cleverbot appeared on the Internet, it has held on its website about 65 million interviews with Internet users around the world. And in the course of these conversations Cleverbot, just as people do, learned what to say in different situations with people from different social groups.

All the conducted interviews replenish the computer’s database, so that the more it “talks”, the more answers to similar questions it accumulates. Accordingly, the more “human” its answers eventually become. In addition, the computer when answering tracks all phrases in the current conversation to choose the best answer.

Thus, Cleverbot continues “growing wiser” by itself, without the direct involvement of the creator. When reporters asked Cleverbot how it becomes more and more intelligent, it replied:

Actually, I do not believe that one can become more intelligent. It is possible to learn more, but you can’t become more clever”.


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This Post Has One Comment

  1. Amanda Mayhem (@theamandamayhem)

    Wow. All eyes on these guys.

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