Yep ... and I think this is good news for AGI, as VCs often move in groups... this will probably make it easier for others to get AGI funding over the next few years...
My impression is that Dileep, while he has a different and probably more solid technical architecture than Jeff Hawkins (his former boss at Numenta), shares with Hawkins the confidence that hierarchical perception holds the key to human-level general intelligence. As a result of this confidence, it seems to me he hasn't thought a great deal about aspects of human general intelligence beyond hierarchical perception. Their fundraising success can of course largely be attributed to pedigree: that Dileep was Hawkins' R&D leader, but also that their CEO Scott Brown has a Silicon Valley business track record and great contacts. But I'm sure they also gave a good science/engineering pitch, able to pass due diligence via Stanford profs, etc. It certainly must have helped, in the latter regard, that Dileep's approach is sorta a more sophisticated version of what Andrew Ng and Google recently did with automated recognition of objects in online videos (which got a lot of media attention). Whether or not they succeed at cracking the AGI problem, I bet they will come up with some interesting object recognition software, and make some algorithmic advances... A partial comparable that comes to mind is PowerSet. They raised $$ with some talk about making fundamental progress on the natural language understanding problem, via using massive Web data. They did some fairly interesting research stuff, but before they made much progress toward their grand goals, they sold to M$ for $100M or so. Their technology and team were dismantled and basically diffused into M$'s natural language and search initiatives. A difference though is that PowerSet held rights to some broad NLP patents (which they acquired I believe from AT&T), which probably helped make them look appealing as an acquisition target.... -- Ben G On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 4:31 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > http://gigaom.com/2012/08/21/vicarious-gets-15m-to-search-for-the-key-to-artificial-intelligence/ > **** > > ** ** > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/212726-11ac2389> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > -- Ben Goertzel, PhD http://goertzel.org "My humanity is a constant self-overcoming" -- Friedrich Nietzsche ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
