[loorinm]

Um, did anyone really not see this coming?

Their whole deal was “we are going to merge humans and machines”, yet it had zero technical side on how to do that.

“It has become a conference and seminar company” .....

No, that’s what it was from day 1.

[grondilu]

It was pretty clear from the beginning that this was all hype and talk with very little substance, but I thought it would slide more towards the cult direction (scientology-style, that is). What I read in this article suggests it's not going there, which frankly is almost a relief : a cult would be more concerning than just a failing company.

[sorent]

Not true.

Co-founder Ray Kurtzweil has a personal belief on that, which he wrote a book about (How to Create a Mind). In it, he describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and argues that emulating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence. I believe he now works to bring natural language understanding to Google, hired personally by CEO

[loorinm]

Ok, that sounds cool. Is there a proof of concept somewhere?