Some of the most entrepreneurial minds in the world are joining forces to help a small tech startup create a digital brain.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla owner Elon Musk join the likes of PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, actor Ashton Kutcher and Facebook’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz by investing in San Francisco-based Vicarious.
The startup wants to create software that ‘thinks and learns like a human’, and to do that, the firm is attempting to build a programme that mimics the brain’s neocortex.
According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg, Musk and Kutcher have invested a total of $40million in the company.
The neocortex is the top layer of the cerebral hemispheres in the brain of mammals. It is approximately 3mm thick and has six layers, each involved with various functions.
These include sensory perception, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language in humans.
According to the company’s website: ‘Vicarious 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 Scott Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal if the firm is successful with its current project, Vicarious will have created ‘a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn’t need to eat or sleep.’
