Vicarious takes on the human brain

Vicarious, a startup company looking to reproduce aspects of the human brain, has recently announced that it’s algorithms can accurately solve modern CAPTCHAs, including Google’s reCAPTCHA, with a 90% success rate. According to a Stanford University paper, they “deem a captcha scheme broken when the attacker is able to reach a precision of at least 1%” using automated means. A claim of 90% accuracy would therefore render the current CAPTCHAs relatively obsolete.

However, an automated script to read CAPTCHAs is not Vicarious’ primary goal. The purpose was to show that a machine could learn to “see”, and others believed it could be done. Vicarious was able to raise $15 Million Series A, led by Dustin Moskovitz’s (co-founded of Facebook) “Good Ventures”. “The technology that Vicarious is developing has the potential to improve all lives and revolutionize every industry,” Dustin said.

Dileep George, co-founder of Vicarious, stated that there are still years of research ahead before he sees this new technology having any wide-spread use, but that his team, as well as his investors, are ok with waiting for this product that they all believe will change lives. But until then, they will take the project one step at a time as they attempt to teach the machine.