>>"The fact that nobody seems interested in acquiring them sends the signal that they probably are no better than anybody else building AI tools"
Seriously? The bar to being successful is an acquisition offer from Google? I'd understand if money was the driving factor. But Jeff Hawkings has already made a bunch of that from his previous ventures and to me at least, it seems that he's genuinely passionate about building something extraordinary. So, I'm still rooting for Numeta.
In the SV bubble the measure of success may be getting "acquired", but I hope Numeta is more about actually creating some groundbreaking advancements in AI & not just getting acquired.
The thing is, Since On Intelligence came out I haven't really seen any real products from them. Sure, they created some tools that they expect other developers to build projects on top of them but that is it. Honestly, with all his talks claiming how his algorithms are much better than the current state of the art I would expect really good image recognition, speech recognition or something like IBM's Watson to come out of their labs. But everything I've seen from them seems average. Not that much better than the state of the art.
If they had anything groundbreaking and I were google, I'd want to acquire that technology to further the goal of Strong AI. Google is interested in producing AI and will acquire anybody that can help it with that goal. Google is not interested in Numenta's technology, and I'm sure they've checked their technology, which makes me think that Numenta doesn't really have much to offer.
Whether Jeff is interested in selling or not is irrelevant.
They absolutely have a commercial venture going: https://www.groksolutions.com/
Ever since I first read the book "On Intelligence" I thought Jeff Hawkings was on the right track with Strong AI. The insights I got from reading the book I thought were invaluable. I don't know how close they are to Strong AI or if they are closer then anybody else but I would expect that if they were making any real head way into the field that Google would already have made an offer to buy them.
At least that is what I would do if I wanted to be the first to control the technology. The fact that nobody seems interested in acquiring them sends the signal that they probably are no better than anybody else building AI tools.