Website vicarious.com Type of business Privately held company | Founded 2010 | |
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Industry Artificial intelligence Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States Founders Dileep George, Scott Phoenix | ||
Vicarious is an artificial intelligence company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. They are using the theorized computational principles of the brain to build software that can think and learn like a human.
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Founders
The company was founded in 2010 by D. Scott Phoenix and Dr. Dileep George. Before co-founding Vicarious, Phoenix was Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Fund and CEO of Frogmetrics, a touchscreen analytics company he co-founded through the Y Combinator incubator program. Previously, Dr. George was Chief Technology Officer at Numenta, a company he co-founded with Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky (PALM, HAND) while completing his PhD at Stanford University.
Funding
The company launched in February 2011 with funding from Founders Fund, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo (former Facebook CTO and co-founder of Quora), Felicis Ventures, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. In August 2012, in its Series A round of funding, it raised an additional US $ 15 million. The round was led by Good Ventures; Founders Fund, Open Field Capital and Zarco Investment Group also participated.
The company received 40 million dollars in its Series B round of funding. The round was led by such notables as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, and Ashton Kutcher. An additional undisclosed amount was later contributed by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Skype co-founder Janus Friis and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.
Recursive Cortical Network
Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Known as the Recursive Cortical Network (RCN), it is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. The system is powered by a balanced approach that takes sensory data, mathematics, and biological plausibility into consideration. On October 22, 2013, beating CAPTCHA, Vicarious announced its AI was reliably able to solve modern CAPTCHAs, with character recognition rates of 90% or better. These claims were independently verified by Dr. Luis von Ahn (inventor of CAPTCHA, Associate Professor at CMU), Ray Kurzweil (creator of the first text-to-speech systems and AI researcher at Google X), and Dr. Bruno Olshausen (Director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Professor at UC Berkeley).
Vicarious has indicated that its AI was not specifically designed to complete CAPTCHAs and its success at the task is a product of its advanced vision system. Because Vicarious’s algorithms are based on insights from the human brain, it is also able to recognize photographs, videos, and other visual data.