Building synthetic brains capable of human level discovery and invention...

Summary - Imagination Engines is a small company working with what many have recognized as potentially the biggest idea in history, a technology that can invent everything else. Accordingly, largely due to issues of credibility, the company's road to success has been rocky. There have been many skeptics and critics, but there have been more believers and supporters. Now the company thrives upon a significant contract stream and tangible products that speak louder for the technology than words possibly could.

Details - In 1995, our founder, Dr. Stephen Thaler, was building a significant suite of US and international patents that according to many knowledgeable in the field of AI, would enable a radically new form of synthetic intelligence that could be applied to every conceivable problem known to mankind. With such a capacity came a formidable challenge, to build a company that was likewise dedicated to doing most everything. Of course, a mission statement along these lines didn't seem plausible to investors, nor was it likely that anyone, not even the most seasoned MBA, could write a business plan for a potential enterprise that was so broad and grandiose in its focus. Some investors laughed off the technology as some kind of joke, while others who saw the light offered only millions of dollars for control of a company that was intrinsically worth gross national products.

In the early days, the foremost problem faced by the company was trying to sell concepts, rather than products. Even though the IEI patents set the stage for free-thinking machines that could potentially invent all subsequent technology, science, and art, most investors lacked the theoretical background to fully appreciate the immense power of the IEI neural paradigms. It wasn't clear to them how the core IP suite enabled human level thinking in machines or how their investment could lead to significant profits based upon theory and proof-of-principle experiments.

Academia, no longer idealistic, and highly entrepreneurial, was unwilling to divert attention away from its own efforts in AI, and hence not likely to give its seal of approval (i.e., due diligence)  to a little known company outside of its 'network'. Writing peer-reviewed papers was a challenging process for even our well-credentialed founder who lacked any active affiliation with a major university. Besides, IEI was not the ivy-league campus or the high profile company that the public and the press expected to make AI's most important discoveries. Anyway, it probably wasn't a good idea to publish precious trade secrets in exchange for corporate notoriety.

Gaining a foothold within industry was likewise difficult. IEI could not simply connect with scientists and engineers within potential client corporations who would often feel threatened by a technology that could possibly replace them. Instead, the company had to establish 'beach heads' in upper management, setting up controlled competitions between their scientists and engineers against our patented synthetic intelligence approaches. Once management observed the clear cut technical advantage, and most importantly, the savings in dollars and time, they typically bought in to our capabilities.

Making the problem even more difficult, was a rash of popular science writers who began writing about all of the remarkable things that artificial intelligence was about to achieve, without any details on the methodologies that would be used. Suddenly we began hearing about so-called 'singularities' in machine intelligence without anyone telling us how creative idea generation could be achieved in these futuristic systems. Others began to describe human cognition using IEI patents as the metaphors for mind, without giving credit where credit was due. Ironically, neurobiologists were learning about the brain from the IEI patent suite and then hawking some of these revolutionary ideas as long-standing knowledge within their largely academic community.

But in 2001, things began to change for the better. One spring day of that year, Thaler's former coworkers from Boeing called from NASA's Langley Research Center and excitedly reported that NASA's chief scientist and visionary, Dr. Dennis Bushnell was praising the work of a small St. Louis based company called Imagination Engines. As part of his "Future Warfare ca. 2025" talk, he discussed the Creativity Machine Paradigm as "AI's Best Bet" at creating human to trans-human level intelligence in machines. Shortly thereafter, over dinner in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, Bushnell informally commented to the company's founder that this is the technology that a popular AI prognosticator claimed would appear on the scene in 30 years. The irony was that the foundation of this futuristic technology was available now, through IEI. 

Word began spreading and soon IEI became engaged in numerous government and commercial contracts. Chief among the supporters of Imagination Engines, was the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). With the successful accomplishment of multiple AFRL contracts, along with many other 'short-order' contracts with industry the company provided a very impressive due diligence trail. Yes, the technology was real, and the company was rapidly increasing its execute capacity, now employing a dozen engineers at its St. Louis headquarters, not to mention the others associated with its off site enterprises.

Currently, IEI is one of the most quickly growing government contractors in the U.S. It is now strongly allied with the U.S. automotive industry, and is rapidly growing additional joint ventures to its growing 'planetary system' of affiliated industries.