I am always skeptical of people trying to "emulate" the human brain in machine learning. We currently do not have the tools to accurately record and analyze the dynamics of networks of neurons in the brain, and any group that claims to advance ML with knowledge of the cortex is spouting bullshit. Modern advances in ML are driven by great engineering, not biological insight.
Never before has an AI startup done so little with so much. That puts their total funding with debt at around $130 million. It's an utter waste. Reminds me of the $15 billion IBM has spent on Watson. The people with the money are very poor judges of technologists in this space.
Would be great if they showed some demonstrations / proof of any kind. DeepMind did great in that respect. I understand they're working on a different problem, but it's been a number of years; usually correct ideas don't take that long to show some promising progress.
Interesting the bird analogy again - “airplanes don’t flap their wings” was in a recent article by Jeff Hawkins describing Numenta's approach (<a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/what-intelligent-machines-need-to-learn-from-the-neocortex" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/what-intelligent...</a>). Vicarious co-founder Dileep George was also a co-founder at Numenta. Perhaps they have similar philosophies to approach but Numenta modeling the Neo-cortex while Vicarious modeling the entire brain?