Vicarious is a new technology startup that works on creating software that leans like human brain. The company, which is based in San Francisco, just wanted to prove that they’re the best in the world when it comes to artificial intelligence software and they’ve now created a software that can crack CAPTCHA like the humans do.
If you’ve signed up for any form online which deals with emails and other services, you’d have come across CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), that would want you to enter some random characters to check if you’re human or a bot. For decades, these CAPTCHAs were hard to crack with the use of computers. But today, Vicarious might have changed that.
The company has posted a demo video of cracking the CAPTCHA using the software which they’ve built.
The software cracks the CAPTCHAs of Google, eBay and Paypal but we are not clear as to how this works. On the other hand, the company is not intentional to release this software to the public.
Vicarious claims that their software takes advantage of core insights from machine learning and neuroscience and the success rate of cracking the CAPTCHA has been about 90 percent. The technology that powers the company’s software is called Recursive Cortical Network (RCN), and the commercial use of this technology is years away from now.
Talking about the other technologies that is trying to crack CAPTCHA, Vicarious’ co-founder, D. Scott Phoenix says:
“Recent AI systems like IBM’s Watson and deep neural networks rely on brute force: connecting massive computing power to massive datasets. This is the first time this distinctively human act of perception has been achieved, and it uses relatively minuscule amounts of data and computing power. The Vicarious algorithms achieve a level of effectiveness and efficiency much closer to actual human brains”
This is a huge milestone for machines that learn by itself. And we can’t wait to see where it goes.