Facebook, SpaceX CEOs Invest in Artificial Intelligence Company

The founders of Facebook and SpaceX and actor Ashton Kutcher are investing $40 million in a company working to create an artificial brain.

The company Vicarious FPC has the ambitious goal of recreating the neocortex — the part of the brain that controls movement, vision, language and other complex processes — on a computer. The result would be a computer that thinks like a person, "Except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep," Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal. But achieving that goal could be decades away.

In the meantime, Facebook could use artificial intelligence (AI) to convert huge amounts of data into a knowledge database, and the social networking company is already using AI for facial recognition in photos. The WSJ asked Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, and Kutcher about their investment, but both refused to comment.

Phoenix said that Vicarious aims to create a computer that could recognize not only shapes and objects, but textures.

The company has been very tight-lipped about how its technology works, and won't disclose its location for fear of corporate espionage or hacking, the WSJ reported.