Israeli company Cartica develops AI systems to mimic child’s brain

Some of the smartest engineers and academics around the world have spent years pioneering artificial intelligence and seeking breakthrough advances.

Maybe they should leave the work to toddlers.

That’s the premise of Cartica AI, an Israeli company taking a childlike approach to rethinking artificial intelligence. Rather than conventionally train machine-learning systems with reams of information, the company’s technology trains systems by mimicking the way the human brain develops.

“If you are a newborn and you look into this world, you have no idea what you see,” Karl Thomas Neumann, former Opel CEO who is a board member and investor in the company, tells Automotive News. “But you start structuring things — lines, curves, relationships.”

Cartica calls those simple structures “signatures,” and with remarkably few of them strung together, the company believes AI systems can make intelligent inferences about what’s in images captured by cameras. Such technology could play a role in improving the performance of driver-assist and self-driving systems.

Toyota AI Ventures and BMW i Ventures, the venture capital arms of the respective automakers, along with supplier Continental, invested in the Tel-Aviv based startup’s Series B funding round last September. Cartica, a spinoff from a more general-purpose AI company, Cortica, has raised $70 million since its founding last year.