Artificial Development is a research company specializing in artificial intelligence, based in Palo Alto, CA. They have just built the largest neural network ever created.

The neural network, called CCortex, runs on a high-performance, parallel supercomputer, a Linux cluster with up to 500 nodes and 1,000 processors, 1 terabyte of RAM, and 200 terabytes of storage.

With 20 billion neurons and 20 trillion connections, CCortex is up to 10,000 times larger than any previous attempt to replicate, partially or completely, primary characteristics of human intelligence, and is the first neural system to achieve a level of complexity rivaling that of the mammalian brain.

From a quantitative perspective, the number of neurons and interconnections in the CCortex represents about 20% of a human brain, and approximately 60% of a chimpanzee brain … this is an astonishing accomplishment, given that just a few years ago, artificial neural nets had at most 10,000 to 100,000 neurons.

The neural networks in CCortex are currently being trained, much like ‘real’ neurons are trained to recognize a cat or a dog or the letter “A”.

Aside from providing insights into the operation of the human cortex, CCortex may find uses in data mining, network security, search engine technologies and natural language processing.

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