Elon Musk, SF resident Mark Zuckerberg, and Ashton Kutcher just put $40 million into Vicarious FPC, a secretive artificial-intelligence company working toward creating a computer that may be able to think like you, yet is superior to you in other, highly significant ways.
Vicarious has an ambitious goal: Replicating the neocortex, the part of the brain that sees, controls the body, understands language and does math. Translate the neocortex into computer code and “you have a computer that thinks like a person,” says Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix. “Except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep.”It may be decades before companies like Vicarious can create computers with human-like intelligence. But web outfits like Google, YahooYHOO +1.01%, Facebook and others have more immediate uses for artificial intelligence.
Facebook, for instance, wants to turn the massive amounts of information shared by its users into a database of wisdom. Ask Facebook a question, and, if all goes to plan, it will spit out an answer based on facts users have shared. Facebook is also using artificial intelligence for facial recognition to identify users in photos. Facebook recently hired a leader in artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, to run a new lab.
In other words, the dummy from That '70s Show basically just laid the groundwork for Cyberdyne to kill us all. Thanks, Kelso.
