back to article Zuckerberg, Musk and Fake Steve Jobs invest in secretive AI firm

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have become some of the latest investors in secretive artificial intelligence software firm Vicarious. The SpaceX billionaire and the Facebook founder took part in a $40m funding round, the second major cash-raising from the firm in the last two years, the Wall Street Journal reported. The actor …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So the only intelligence on Facebook is artificial

  2. NoneSuch Silver badge

    "Vicarious wants to replicate the neocortex of the human brain in computer code, coming up with a software programme that can think like a person."

    Let's hope this person doesn't need to take Zoloft pills regularly to function.

    1. dogged

      Let's hope it doesn't think like roughly 85% of reg commentards.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Trollface

        Let's hope it doesn't think like roughly 85% of reg commentards.

        There is a 85% chance that you are included in this undesirable set!

        Fancy some health insurance?

    2. Mephistro

      (@ None Such)

      "Let's hope this person doesn't need to take Zoloft pills regularly to function."

      They want to create Marvin, the Paranoid Android? Funny! Hehe he ... *shudders*

    3. DerekCurrie
      Devil

      … Or Lithium

      Considering the current state of Actual Intelligence amidst my human species, what we're likely to create is Artificial Insanity.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No Innovation !

    You mean they are going to create programmes that spend their time downloading p*rn, (and kitten videos), play flappy bird, and alternatively write articles or inane comments on the Register?

    Hmmm and how is that an improvement? We've got a few billion of those already !

    Innovate Please....

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Angel

      Re: No Innovation !

      But think of the fact that all the ACs can then be replaced by a single program!

      "The actual effect of minimum wage laws is not to give workers at the margin higher paygrades, but to have them replaced by machinery." Hell yeah!

  4. Archibear

    "Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, 'Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.'"

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We hear this every few years

    I remember when Wolfram Alpha was going to do this. Instead it is answering Siri queries using the same definitely-not-AI search-based technology that Google uses for Google Now queries.

    Every new AI startup claims they're going to simulate the brain in software, but find that since we don't actually know how the brain works, that doing so isn't so easy, so they fall back on writing software that uses methods completely different from what the human brain uses.

    I don't think we'll ever achieve AI by simulating the human brain, because we don't even know exactly what, if any, role that quantum mechanics takes in the function of a single neuron, let alone across billions of them. We may someday have machines smarter than people, but their thinking will be as different from ours as the way a car moves from place to place is different to the way a human moves.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Quite a difference...

    ...between doing most of the jobs that people currently do and creating cheap renewable energy.

    One set we know the other we do not. But yes, of course, surely a machine will save us.

  7. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    FAIL

    He talks a good game. But recall the first rule of *successful* "AI" companies

    If they do succeed it will no longer be AI.

    Despite 60+ years of failure people persist in thinking that the "obvious" way to duplicate a very large collection (10^10) of low speed (but very high fan out / fan in) elements operating in parallel is with a small number of high speed serial executing machines.

    So why should this version be any more successful than any of the previous?

    1. DropBear

      Re: He talks a good game. But recall the first rule of *successful* "AI" companies

      Despite 60+ years of failure people persist in thinking that the "obvious" way to duplicate a very large collection (10^10) of low speed (but very high fan out / fan in) elements operating in parallel is with a small number of high speed serial executing machines.

      Because while those serial machines are indeed a poor direct fit for the problem, they also happen to be know to be able to simulate any information processing system given enough time, and they are also fortuitously easily accessible commercially. Once we have more than a faint clue of what we are actually trying to copy we might prefer to go the GPU way and create custom ASICs for the job which will undoubtedly perform closer to human real-time - but as long we are still throwing around theories, the current serial machines we have handy should / will have to do just fine.

  8. jubtastic1
    Terminator

    Consciousness

    Is a debug log, the things you are thinking about right now have already happened, you are finished with each thought before you become aware of it.

    Human Intelligence isn't special, it's certainly not magic, it's just a shitload of algorithms running in parallel with a human readable log. The current AI efforts aren't failing because they haven't replicated 10^10 neurones, that's like saying that transistors can't replicate the valve based monsters that preceded them, they're failing because the mix of algorithms is really fucking complicated.

    We're taking tiny steps towards AI and it can seem like it's never going to happen, but (prediction), it will occur suddenly, in a single great jump from barely started, simply because someone changed a parameter or made a minor tweak to an algorithm. Machine AI is inevitable.

    /side note: In my youth I worked in print, I remember a manual we printed for a 'Red Baron' WWI flying ace game which contained background info on the main protagonists, the aformentioned Red Baron, an English chap I can't recall, and an American, Eddie Rickenbacker, born 1890, died 1973. Eddie was born before powered flight and died after man had stepped on the moon. I was blown away by the progress this man had seen in his lifetime, and for a long time it's seemed like it was an aberration, fuelled by three wars, two hot and one cold, but I'm starting to think the changes wrought in my lifetime will blow away a mere trip to the moon.

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