IBM is expanding its artificial intelligence division by investing in Numenta, a machine intelligence company that is said to be developing an AI software that mimics the human brain.
IBM has set up a research group to work on Numenta's learning algorithms at its Almaden research lab in San Jose, California. The project is called Cortical Learning Center internally and has a team of about a 100 people who will work on algorithms created by Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta. The team is currently teaching the software to control physical equipment, which will make it useful in robotics. According to sources, Numenta will focus heavily on enterprise applications for the software. Read: Is the time for Artificial Intelligence finally here?
Researcher Winfried Wilcke is leading the team and has described plans to create a computer that’s a physical re-creation of the Numenta algorithms. This would involve stacking multiple silicon wafers on top of each other with physical connections between them, mimicking the networks described in the algorithms.
“Our goal is not to be biologically inspired; I want to re-create exactly,” Hawkins told the news source. “This is how you would really build a machine intelligence.” He added, "We think we're building an intellectual property base for the next 30 years of computing."
However, the company has received some criticism who say that the algorithms are too simplified and only mimic some of the known mechanisms of the brain. Geometric Intelligence Founder Gary Marcus states, that he has yet to see the machine to "try to handle natural language understanding or even produce state-of-the-art results in image recognition." Read: After Elon Musk, Bill Gates now warns against dangers of AI
Source: Technology Review