| Advertisement |
(UPI) -- Artificial intelligence startup Vicarious announced Monday that its algorithms have cracked CAPTCHA -- those squiggly bits of text meant to identify humans online. CAPTCHA, or the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” is meant to deny access to automated programs such as spam commenters while easily letting humans through. But Vicarious says it's gotten a machine to pass the test.
Advertisement
The company's Recursive Cortical Network (RCN) technology, still in its prototype stages, leverages "core insights from machine learning and neuroscience" to build an AI starting with visual perception.
According to Vicarious, it "achieves success rates up to 90 percent on modern CAPTCHAs from Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Captcha.com, and others. This advancement renders text-based CAPTCHAs no longer effective as a Turing test."
The company claims it gets 95 percent per letter on Google's reCAPTCHA, the most widely used test, and that it solves reCAPTCHA 90 percent of the time. The company released a video showing the software at work.
"Understanding how brain creates intelligence is the ultimate scientific challenge. Vicarious has a long term strategy for developing human level artificial intelligence, and it starts with building a brain-like vision system. Modern CAPTCHAs provide a snapshot of the challenges of visual perception, and solving those in a general way required us to understand how the brain does it", said Vicarious co-founder Dr. Dileep George.
"Recent AI systems like IBM’s Watson and deep neural networks rely on brute force: connecting massive computing power to massive datasets. This is the first time this distinctively human act of perception has been achieved, and it uses relatively minuscule amounts of data and computing power," said co-founder D. Scott Phoenix.
A CAPTCHA is considered broken if an automated algorithm can solve it even 1 percent of the time. The 90 percent success rate achieved by Vicarious on text-based CAPTCHAs compares to 0 percent from state-of-the-art algorithms investigated by Microsoft.
The company says "the commercial applications of RCN will have broad implications for robotics, medical image analysis, image and video search, and many other fields."
Notably, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is a member of the Vicarious board. Moskovitz left Facebook in 2008, later becoming the largest angel investor in photo-sharing site Path, which has been plagued with privacy issues, civil penalties and FTC probation -- and as recently as June of this year, spam texts from the app were still hitting users' and contacts' mobile phones.
"We should be careful not to underestimate the significance of Vicarious crossing this milestone," Moskovitz said. "This is an exciting time for artificial intelligence research, and they are at the forefront of building the first truly intelligent machines."
