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Does anyone know why Dileep George left Numenta? Wasn't he a co-founder there with Jeff Hawkins?

Is there much difference between the goals of Vicarious and Numenta?

I can only speculate, but as you may recall, Numenta abandoned their original, belief-propagation-based design, replacing it with a new one based on sparse distributed memory. Dileep had done a lot of work on the original design, and I recall reading that's what Vicarious is using, having licensed it from Numenta. So I think you can put it down to a difference in technical direction between Dileep and Jeff. As far as I know, the split was amicable.

Their marketing and fund-raising approaches also seem to be completely different. I think this was good for both of them, especially if Dileep is licensing from Numenta.

Win-win scenario.

I don't think their goals are considerably different; I'm curious about their approaches however. How divergent are they?

There's some journalism-speak about it here.[1]

It seems like the two algorithms are very similar, but that RCN's represent information in a more continuous way. Maybe this allows for more flexibility? Do the sizes of the hierarchical / recursive chunks get changed over time now, or is it not a strict hierarchy anymore? Stuff is weird.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/vicarious-announces-15-million-fun...

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