There have been a couple of companies that have tried this, mainly Numenta (Jeff Hawkins) and now Vicarious (Dileep George). The latter it's had a successful funding round, getting millions from big-name investors and entrepreneurs.
The value proposition for both of them was creating biologically inspired AI, and Numenta eventually came out with an anomaly detection program, Grok. I think it was largely bankrolled by its founder (he was also the inventor of the palm pilot), though I'm not entirely sure. The value proposition for Vicarious is that it has a secretive, general-purpose AI (not to be confused with Artificial General Intelligence, aka Strong AI), but save a few videos of their program solving CAPTCHA's, nobody knows too much about their offerings yet.
Numenta is very much alive. Grok is available in the form of an AMI on the AWS EC2 marketplace, and if you're curious about how it all works under the hood, NuPIC, the core implementation is free software, available at https://github.com/numenta/nupic
It allows complete confidentiality and 100% presence for your personal assistants. It also brings down personal assistants to the price that everyman can afford... and that's where marketers show why you could never live without one.
