Harri Valpola dreams of an internet of beautiful AI minds

Valpola, 44, is founder of The Curious AI Company, a 20-person artificial intelligence startup based in Helsinki, which has just raised $3.67 million in funding – small change compared to many tech funding rounds, but an impressive sum for a company that has no products and is only interested in research. Wanting to put his theories into practice, Valpola co-founded ZenRobotics, a startup building brains for intelligent robots. At this year's Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (the leading conference in AI, better known as NIPS), he is going to present a cousin of the ladder network, punningly entitled Mean Teacher. "I've met Harri a few times, and we have similar views on AI and deep learning," says Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London.