| I cannot understand why it is that so many obviously very intelligent people decide that we need another computer vision-based startup. Because the unfortunate truth is that computer vision (right now) doesn't work. Let me qualify that. From the academic / research point of view, there have been a collection of real successes in computer vision in, say, the last ten years. But my sense is that what counts as a research success is a long way from what counts as a practical business success. For example, the best generic object detector at the moment is probably Felzenszwalb's using deformable parts-based models[1]. And it's just not that good. On the latest PASCAL object detection challenge, you'll see that its mean precision is only ~30%. Scott Brown, the interviewee, sets Vicarious apart by highlighting the fact that their system will be neurobiologically inspired. But the idea of learning hierarchical systems that mimic the brain's visual processing system is hardly new, and the jury is still out on whether these systems can do better than the "hand-coded" systems like Felzenszwalb's. As a random example, see [2]. Like.com showed you can build a business that uses computer vision in some way. But as Brown snarks, they "use a big bag of different heuristics to figure out the image." For the time being, that seems to be the only way to get computer vision to work in practice. That all said, I wish them luck. [1] http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~pff/latent/ [2] http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang//papers/nips07-sparsed... |