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| Company type | Privately held |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | 2010; 15 years ago (2010) |
| Founders | |
| Headquarters | San Francisco Bay Area,California, U.S. |
| Parent | Intrinsic (Alphabet Inc.) |
| Website | vicarious |
Vicarious was anartificial intelligence company based in theSan Francisco Bay Area,California. They use the theorized computational principles of the brain to attempt to build software thatcan 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.
The company was founded in 2010 byD. Scott Phoenix andDileep George. Before co-founding Vicarious, Phoenix was Entrepreneur in Residence atFounders Fund and CEO of Frogmetrics, a touchscreen analytics company he co-founded through theY Combinator incubator program. Previously, George wasChief Technology Officer at Numenta,[1] a company he co-founded withJeff Hawkins andDonna Dubinsky while completing hisPhD atStanford University.[2]
The company launched in February 2011 with funding from Founders Fund,Dustin Moskovitz,Adam D’Angelo (formerFacebookCTO and co-founder ofQuora), Felicis Ventures, andPalantir co-founderJoe Lonsdale. In August 2012, in itsSeries A round of funding, it raised an additional $15 million. The round was led byGood 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 includingMark Zuckerberg,Elon Musk, and others.[3] An additional undisclosed amount was later contributed byAmazon.com CEOJeff Bezos,Yahoo! co-founderJerry Yang,Skype co-founderJanus Friis andSalesforce.com CEOMarc Benioff.[4]
Vicarious is developingmachine 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 agenerativegraphical 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, beatingCAPTCHA, 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]
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