Vicarious (company)

Last updated
Vicarious
Company type Privately held
Industry Artificial intelligence
Founded2010;14 years ago (2010)
Founders
Headquarters San Francisco Bay Area, California,
U.S.
Parent Intrinsic (Alphabet Inc.)
Website vicarious.com

Vicarious was an artificial intelligence company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. They use the theorized computational principles of the brain to attempt to build software that can think and learn like a human. Vicarious describes its technology as "a turnkey robotics solution integrator using artificial intelligence to automate tasks too complex and versatile for traditional automations". Alphabet Inc acquired the company in 2022 for an undisclosed amount.

Contents

Founders

The company was founded in 2010 by D. Scott Phoenix and 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, George was Chief Technology Officer at Numenta, [1] a company he co-founded with Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky while completing his PhD at Stanford University. [2]

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 $15 million. The round was led by Good Ventures; Founders Fund, Open Field Capital and Zarco Investment Group also participated. [2]

The company received $40 million in its Series B round of funding. The round was led by individuals including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others. [3] 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. [4]

Recursive Cortical Network

Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. One such software is a vision system known as the Recursive Cortical Network (RCN), it is a generative graphical 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. [5] [6] On October 22, 2013, beating CAPTCHA, Vicarious announced its model was reliably able to solve modern CAPTCHAs, with character recognition rates of 90% or better when trained on one style. However, Luis von Ahn, a pioneer of early CAPTCHA and founder of reCAPTCHA, expressed skepticism, stating: "It's hard for me to be impressed since I see these every few months." He pointed out that 50 similar claims to that of Vicarious had been made since 2003. [7] Vicarious later published their findings in peer-reviewed journal Science. [8]

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. [9]

See also

Related Research Articles

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to deter bot attacks and spam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salesforce</span> American software company

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workday, Inc.</span> American software company

Workday, Inc., is an American on‑demand (cloud-based) financial management, human capital management, and student information system software vendor. Workday was founded by David Duffield, founder and former CEO of ERP company PeopleSoft, along with former PeopleSoft chief strategist Aneel Bhusri, following Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Figure Eight Inc.</span> American software company

Figure Eight was a human-in-the-loop machine learning and artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bret Taylor</span> American computer programmer and entrepreneur

Bret Steven Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is most notable for leading the team that co-created Google Maps and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook, as the chairman of Twitter, Inc.'s board of directors prior to its acquisition by Elon Musk, and as the co-CEO of Salesforce. Taylor was additionally one of the founders of FriendFeed and the creator of Quip. Since 2023, he is chairman of OpenAI and a board member of Shopify.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massimiliano Versace</span>

Massimiliano Versace is the co-founder and the CEO of Neurala Inc, a Boston-based company building Artificial Intelligence emulating brain function in software and used in automating the process of visual inspection in manufacturing. He is also the founding Director of the Boston University Neuromorphics Lab. Massimiliano Versace is a Fulbright scholar and holds two PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Trieste, Italy and Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University, USA. He obtained his BSc from the University of Trieste, Italy.

Dileep George is an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyriac Roeding</span> US-based entrepreneur

Cyriac Roeding is a Silicon Valley-based German-American entrepreneur and investor. He serves as the co-founder and CEO of Earli, an early cancer detection and treatment firm based in Redwood City, California. Earli is based on Synthetic Biopsy technology from Stanford University, and is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Casdin Capital, Sands Capital, Menlo Ventures, ZhenFund (China) and Marc Benioff. Roeding is also a co-founder and chairman of the board of Rewind Co., a diabetes type 2 reversal company. Roeding's venture investing focuses on AI, brain-to-machine interfaces, consumer businesses, biology meeting software and engineering, and consumer robotics. He served as EVP at Paramount Global / CBS, where he started the division CBS Mobile and brought it to profitability, and as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins and its iFund with Apple Inc., where he co-founded and led mobile shopping app shopkick with $22M of venture capital to a $250M cash acquisition by SK Telecom/SK Planet and 20 million users. Shopkick rewards users for just walking into retail stores such as Target Corporation, Best Buy, Macy's and Walmart and engaging with products from Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, L'Oreal etc., driving over $1B in sales annually for its partners. Fast Company ranked shopkick one of the world's 10 Most Innovative Companies In Retail, alongside Apple and Starbucks, and Entrepreneur Magazine placed Roeding on its cover.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mustafa Suleyman</span> British entrepreneur and activist

Mustafa Suleyman is a British artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Microsoft AI, and the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an AI company acquired by Google. After leaving DeepMind, he co-founded Inflection AI, a machine learning and generative AI company, in 2022.

Instabase is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides an applied AI platform that can be used to automate business processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">D. Scott Phoenix</span>

D. Scott Phoenix is an American entrepreneur and former cofounder and CEO of Vicarious, an artificial intelligence research company funded by 250M from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others that was acquired by Intrinsic, an Alphabet company in 2022.

Convoy was an American trucking software company co-founded by CEO Dan Lewis and CTO Grant Goodale.

Clarifai is an independent artificial intelligence company that specializes in computer vision, natural language processing, and audio recognition. One of the first deep learning platforms having been founded in 2013, Clarifai provides an AI platform for unstructured image, video, text, and audio data. Its platform supports the full AI lifecycle for data exploration, data labeling, model training, evaluation and inference around images, video, text, and audio data. Headquartered in Washington DC and with employees in the US, Canada, Argentina, Estonia and India Clarifai uses machine learning and deep neural networks to identify and analyze images, videos, text and audio automatically. Clarifai enables users to implement AI technology into their products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augury (company)</span> Technology company

Augury is a technology company that produces hardware, artificial intelligence, and software that diagnose malfunctions in machinery.

Bezos Expeditions is an American investment firm based in Mercer Island, Washington. It serves as a family office for Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos by managing his personal investments. The firm invests both in early and late stage ventures of companies in different sectors.

Cohere Inc. is a Canadian multinational technology company focused on artificial intelligence for the enterprise, specializing in large language models. Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, and is headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, with offices in Palo Alto, London, and New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emad Mostaque</span> Bangladeshi-British businessperson and former hedge fund manager

Mohammad Emad Mostaque is a British-Bangladeshi business executive, mathematician, and former hedge fund manager. He is the founder and was CEO of Stability AI until 23 March 2024, one of the companies behind Stable Diffusion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yellow.ai</span> Yellow.ai is a company in San Mateo, California that focuses on customer service automation

Yellow.ai, formerly Yellow Messenger, is a multinational company headquartered in San Mateo, California focused on customer service automation. It was founded in 2016 and provides an AI platform for automating customer support experiences across chat and voice. The platform supports more than 135 languages across more than 35 channels.

Data Blanket is an American drone artificial intelligence technology startup company specializing in wildfire management, based in Bellevue, Washington. The startup has developed its own software that utilizes AI to map the perimeter of wildfires, while providing additional real-time information of ground conditions to firefighters on-site. The drones are flown autonomously and are capable of landing on their own.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aidan Gomez</span> Artificial intelligence researcher

Aidan Gomez is a British-Canadian computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, with a focus on natural language processing. He is the co-founder and CEO of the technology company Cohere.

References

  1. ↑ Ha, Anthony. "Early Facebook Executives Back AI Startup Vicarious Systems". New York Times. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  2. 1 2 Ha, Anthony (2011-02-07). "Early Facebook execs back artificial-intelligence startup Vicarious Systems". Venture Beat. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  3. ↑ Cutler, Kim-Mia (22 March 2014). "Vicarious Grabs A Huge, New $40M Growth Round To Advance Artificial Intelligence". TechCrunch. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  4. ↑ Cutler, Kim-Mai (7 April 2014). "Artificial Intelligence Startup Vicarious Grabs Funding From Bezos, Benioff And Jerry Yang". TechCrunch. Retrieved 7 April 2014.
  5. ↑ "Captcha test 'cracked' by US firm Vicarious". BBC News. 28 October 2013. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  6. ↑ Summers, Nick (28 October 2013). "Vicarious claims its AI software can crack up to 90% of CAPTCHAs offered by Google, Yahoo and PayPal". thenextweb.com. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  7. ↑ Hof, Robert. "AI Startup Vicarious Claims Milestone In Quest To Build A Brain: Cracking CAPTCHA". Forbes.
  8. ↑ George, Dileep (2017). "A generative vision model that trains with high data efficiency and breaks text-based CAPTCHAs". Science. 358 (6368). Science Magazine. doi: 10.1126/science.aag2612 . PMID   29074582. S2CID   4468961 . Retrieved 2017-10-31.
  9. ↑ Hof, Robert (28 October 2013). "AI Startup Vicarious Claims Milestone In Quest To Build A Brain: Cracking CAPTCHA". Forbes. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.