Dileep George

Dileep George received a B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1998 and then went to Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry for graduate study.⁠[1]

Before co-founding Numenta he was a research fellow at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute.⁠[2]

In March 2005 Palm founders Jeff HawkinsJeff HawkinsJeff Hawkins is an American engineer, entrepreneur and neuroscience researcher who designed the PalmPilot and the Treo, co-founded Palm Computing, Handspring and Numenta, and proposed the Thousand Brains Theory of the neocortex; in 2024 he created the Thousand Brains Project.Open the full entry and Donna Dubinsky founded Numenta together with him, then a Stanford graduate student, to develop Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) technology modeled on the structure and function of the neocortex.⁠[3]

When the company was announced, co-founder George was to serve as principal engineer; the Menlo Park, California, venture would focus on software tools, support services and IP licensing.⁠[4]

In 2008 he completed his Stanford University dissertation, “How the brain might work: A hierarchical and temporal model for learning and recognition.”⁠[5]

He served as CTO of Numenta before co-founding Vicarious with D. Scott Phoenix.⁠[2]

Vicarious launched in February 2011 with funding from Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo, Felicis VenturesFelicisFelicis (whose funds and earlier brand use the name Felicis Ventures) is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded in 2006 by former Google product manager Aydin Senkut; it has invested in companies including Shopify, Canva and Adyen.Open the full entry and Joe LonsdaleJoe LonsdaleJoe Lonsdale is the founder and managing partner of 8VC and a co-founder of technology companies including Palantir Technologies, Addepar, and OpenGov.Open the full entry, and described the Recursive Cortical Network as its key innovation.⁠[6]

In August 2012 Vicarious raised a $15 million Series A led by Good Ventures; George said the company was still deep in research, with products several years off, adding, “we are very optimistic about our rate of progress.”⁠[6]

On October 26, 2017, the Vicarious team published in Science a vision model based on the recursive cortical network (RCN); George said earlier attempts merely exploited weaknesses of particular CAPTCHAs, whereas the new model fundamentally broke their defenses by parsing text more effectively with less training.⁠[7]

He explained that the company had held back details because of “the obvious Web security implications,” and that most big companies had moved away from text-based CAPTCHAs.⁠[8]

The RCN solved text CAPTCHAs from GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s reCAPTCHA, BotDetect, Yahoo and PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry with more than 50 percent accuracy, against a threshold of 1 percent at which a CAPTCHA is considered broken.⁠[9]

On August 14, 2020, as co-founder of Vicarious, he appeared on episode 115 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, “Brain-Inspired AI,” discussing building a model of the brain, the visual cortex, probabilistic graphical models, the Recursive Cortical Network, solving CAPTCHAs algorithmically, GPT-3 and consciousness.⁠[10]

On April 22, 2021, he and Vicarious colleagues published in Nature Communications, with him as first author, the clone-structured cognitive graph (CSCG), which uses a probabilistic sequence model to form clones of the same observation in different contexts, offering a unifying account of hippocampal cognitive maps and place-cell remapping.⁠[11]

In April 2022 Alphabet’s robotics subsidiary Intrinsic acquired the business of Vicarious for an undisclosed sum; CEO Scott Phoenix and others joined Intrinsic, while Vicarious CTO George and a smaller team joined DeepMind’s research team.⁠[12]

Before the acquisition Vicarious had become a turnkey “Robots-as-a-Service” provider, using AI to automate complex tasks such as palletizing, picking and packing in warehouses.⁠[13]

An April 2025 IIT Bombay alumni profile described him as Director of Research at Google DeepMind, with honors including the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer Award.⁠[1]

He wrote that he met his wife, Sudeshna Pabi, during their PhD studies at Stanford; they have two children and live in California.⁠[1]

On February 25, 2026, Astera Institute announced that he was leaving Google DeepMind to become its Head of AI, leading its AGI research division and working with chief scientist Doris Tsao on brain-inspired computational architectures; Astera said it would commit more than $1 billion in resources to the effort over the coming decade.⁠[14]

Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla, previously a research scientist at Google DeepMind, joined alongside him as research lead.⁠[14]

As of October 2026 Astera Institute’s team page lists him as Head of AI and describes him as an entrepreneur, scientist and engineer working on AI, robotics and neuroscience.⁠[15]

Personal website: Public link: https://blog.dileeplearning.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

X: Public account: https://x.com/dileeplearning (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dileep-george/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

Astera Institute: Official website: https://astera.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]