Tech Review says he praised Numenta for "being closer to biological reality than other machine learning software" -- in other words, it's more brain-like compared to its rivals. For instance, it can make sense of data more quickly than competitors, which have to be fed tons of examples, before they can see patterns and handle their jobs. As such, Numenta's algorithms can potentially give rise to more intelligent software.

The company has its share of critics, however. Gary Marcus, a New York University psychology professor and a co-founder of another AI startup, told Tech Review that while Numenta's creation is pretty brain-like, it's oversimplified. So far, he's yet to see it "try to handle natural language understanding or even produce state-of-the-art results in image recognition." It would be interesting to see IBM use the technology to develop, for example, speech-to-text software head and shoulders above the rest or a voice assistant that can understand any accent, as part of its tests. At the moment, though, Numenta's employees are focusing on teaching the software to control physical equipment to be used in future robots.

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