"This is a neuro-AI company that addresses the two most challenging problems."
One of the richest businessmen in the world, Jeff Bezos, has doubled his investments in the startup Flourish, which is developing Cortex AI — an energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) using the principles of connectomics, the science studying neural connections in the brain. According to Wired, the billionaire's investments in the developments, the results of which have not yet been presented, have reached $100 million.
According to the publication, as a result of the investment round that ended on June 4, Flourish raised $500 million for its project, and its valuation is now estimated at $2.5 billion. Before Wired's publication, little was known about the company — the registration of its account on the social network X (formerly Twitter) dates back to May of this year.
One of the founders of the startup is former head of the neurointerface development division at Meta, Thomas Reardon. He first made a name for himself as a programmer at Microsoft, leading the development of the Internet Explorer web browser in the late 1990s.
Subsequently, Reardon received education as a neurobiologist and now positions himself as a computational neurobiologist. Specialists in this discipline see their task as establishing in terms of computational processes how the nervous system produces human behavior.
As Reardon told Wired, the startup's goal is to create a "synthetic AI brain that will consume 50 watts or less," unlike current large language models (LLMs), which require tens of times more electricity.
The company notes that the human brain originally served as inspiration for the field of AI, but ultimately neural networks turned out to be "far from real neural activity," and developers have not managed to solve either the problem of increasing energy consumption or the ceiling of model trainability.
Flourish acknowledged that it cannot yet boast of the results of its developments but hopes to present several models soon that will lay the groundwork for a "complete rethinking of AI."
Along with Reardon, Flourish was founded by former Amazon vice president Rob Williams, who suggested to his former boss Bezos to invest in the project. As Wired notes, a brief presentation via Zoom was enough to secure the first $50 million from the businessman.
"Flourish is a neuro-AI company that addresses the two most challenging problems facing AI today. These are energy efficiency and continuous learning. We are creating Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system that will have the computational capabilities, trainability, and energy consumption of the human brain," the pitch stated.
Bezos has reportedly told the developers that he is ready to provide even more funds if they ask, the publication adds. Other major investors in the company include Lux Capital and Google Ventures.
On his X (formerly Twitter) on June 4, Reardon invited all computational neurobiologists and AI developers interested in "the most ambitious project" in this field to join Flourish.
The fortune of American billionaire Jeff Bezos is estimated at about $218.9 billion, which places him among the top spots on the list of the richest people in the world (depending on stock fluctuations, he is in the top 5 ranking). His wealth is primarily formed from a huge stake in the Amazon corporation, as well as investments in the aerospace company Blue Origin.
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