Microsoft investing in OpenAI has come as big news in the artificial general intelligence (AGI) space. OpenAI had announced the end of its non-profit operations a few months ago, which got a confirmation following Microsoft’s investment. Since its inception, OpenAI has been working towards the development and promotion of AI which is beneficial to humanity. While it has not achieved a fully efficient AGI system yet, it will now work alongside Microsoft to achieve it.
With OpenAI becoming a for-profit company, it faces competition from many companies across the globe that are working on AGI. In this article, we list nine such companies that work on similar intentions as Open AI.
The list is in alphabetical order.
1| AGI Innovations
Founded in August 2013 AGI Innovations Inc (AGi3) works on long term goal of developing and commercialising the next generation of intelligence engines based on AGI theory. It is working on developing a next-gen AGI engine that can power a wide variety of intelligent applications, while strongly focusing on natural language understanding and learning. As their website notes, they are also implementing spatial/temporal sense and actuator mechanisms that will allow their intelligence engines not only to be utilised in various personal assistant applications but, potentially, also in robotics.
2| Apprente
Apprente focuses on developing AGI-based neuromimetic techniques. With a diverse team of leading architects, developers and researchers with skills ranging from machine learning and neuroscience to computational linguistics, they are strongly focused on enhancing their research in AGI. The team has extensive experience in building state-of-the-art artificial intelligence solutions, and are currently leveraging AI to deliver enterprise solutions for a broad range of customer service applications.
3| DeepMind AI:
It is one of the world leaders in AI research and they are on a scientific mission to push boundaries of AI to a whole new level. Founded in 2010, DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 and are now a part of the Alphabet group. They are trying to work up AGI to solve larger problems that humankind is facing. With an end goal of achieving AGI, they are one of the world leaders in the space and have come with up breakthroughs such as AlphaGo and AlphaStar.
4| Kimera Systems
They are one of the early creators of the world’s first functional artificial general intelligence. The company started off by trying to optimise neuroscience-based approaches to make AI mimic the human brain but then worked backwards from a new definition of intelligence that they determined from quantum mechanics theory. This helped them create an AI that was incredibly versatile. They created the first functional consumer-facing AGI program, Nigel AGI that could come up with its own hypothesis, conclusions, understanding new ideas and concepts on its own.
5| Microsoft Research Lab
Prior to investing in OpenAI, Microsoft Research has been working actively in the field of AGI. It had earlier acquired Maluuba, a Montreal-based company to boost its work on AGI. It has been working on the state-of-the-art research that aims to teach machines to read, think and communicate like humans and its investment on OpenAI further boosts it. AI researchers here are harnessing the explosion of data and computational power with advanced algorithms to enable collaborative and natural interactions between people and machines.
6| New Sapience
New Sapience works on developing Modeled Intelligence (MI) and AGI products and applications to be used by businesses and consumers. They strongly believe that their AGI technology is highly differentiated from the current generation of statistical natural language processing systems as well as the classical AI rule-based systems. They believe that it is complementary and synergistic to the narrow AI systems being developed utilising neural networks and Deep Learning and other “Cognitive Computing” constructs.
7| NNAISENSE
This AGI and deep learning startup aim at building large scale neural network solutions or superhuman perception and intelligent automation. Founded in 2014 by Bas Steunebrink, Faustino Gomez, Jan Koutnik, Jonathan Masci, Jürgen Schmidhuber, the NNAISENSE team has more than 25 years of experience in leveraging AI to build large scale neural network solutions for achieving AGI. They boast of an ultimate goal of marketing general-purpose AI.
8| Numenta
This startup is tacking some of the most important scientific challenges of all time which is reverse-engineering the neocortex. The team believes that thoroughly studying how brain works will help them understand the principles of intelligence and build machines that work on the same principles. Hence creating an AGI mich more efficient than others. Understanding that way neocortex works will lead to a more efficient and faster way of creating intelligent machines for the benefit of mankind.
9| Vicarious
This 2010 founded startup was first introduced to the world when they announced that their technology had solved text-based CAPTCHAs which were designed to distinguish humans from bots. They have now extended their working in developing artificial general intelligence for robots. They combine insights from generative probabilistic models and systems neuroscience which allows to train their model faster and adapts readily.
