One of the world's richest businessmen, Jeff Bezos, has doubled his investment in Flourish, a startup that is developing Cortex AI, an energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) using the principles of the science of connectomics, which studies neural connections in the brain. As Wired reports, the billionaire's investments in developments, the results of which have not yet been presented, reached $100 million.
According to the publication, as a result of an investment round that ended on June 4, Flourish raised $500 million for its project, and its capitalization is now estimated at $2.5 billion. Before the Wired 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 was the former head of the neural interface development department at Meta, Thomas Reardon. He first made his mark as a programmer at Microsoft, leading the development of the Internet Explorer Internet browser in the late 1990s.
Reardon subsequently trained as a neuroscientist and now positions himself as a computational neuroscientist. Specialists in this discipline see it as their task to establish in computational terms how the nervous system produces human behavior.
As Reardon himself told Wired, the startup's goal is to create a “synthetic AI brain that will consume 50 watts or less” as opposed to current large language models (LLMs), which require tens of times more electricity.
The company notes that the human brain initially served as inspiration for the field of AI, but in the end the neural networks turned out to be “far from real neuroactivity,” and the developers were unable to solve either the problem of rising energy costs or the ceiling on the models’ learning ability.
Flourish admitted that it cannot yet boast of the results of its developments, but hopes to present several models in the near future that will mark the beginning of a “complete rethinking of AI.”
Together with Reardon, Flourish was founded by former Amazon vice president Rob Williams, who invited his former boss Bezos to invest in the project. As Wired notes, a short presentation via Zoom was enough to receive the first $50 million from the businessman.
“Flourish is a neuro-AI company that solves two of the 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 computing power, learning ability and energy consumption of a human brain,” the pitch read.
Bezos managed to tell the developers that he was ready to provide even more funds if they asked, the publication adds. Other major investors in the company were Lux Capital and Google Ventures.
On his X (formerly Twitter), Reardon on June 4 invited all computational neuroscientists and AI developers interested in “the most ambitious project” in the field to join Flourish.
