(Wired) – With $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, Flourish wants to reinvent AI by putting real neurons under the microscope.

Here’s what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom:

Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.

A month later, I’m lunching with Reardon and Williams in the Flatiron neighborhood in New York City. Reardon gets right to the point. AI has dug itself into a hole, he says. Though increasingly powerful, large language models are greedy consumers of computer power and data. (Read More)