Remember apart from the Truenorth project from IBM which was indeed funded by DARPA for devising a POC and test feasibility of such design all the other ones are not really neuron spiking designs.
They are simple designs either around NAND or NOR logic gates and a variation thereof. Hence when you see companies like Dell or HP investing billions of dollars they are not really working on a neuron spiking design but simplistic design which is still heavily dependent upon power.
IBM's chip has 1 mil neurons with 256 mil synapses and can work on as little as 70 mW power which is exceptional for a processor that can compute a large dataset.
So think about it this way that you can do a very very small percentage of processing compare to a human brain with this chip.
In comparision
this from a recent design
Now compare that with a human brain and you have
100 billion neurons with and 1000 trillions of connections.
The most important part of this whole discussion is that the human brain works on a measly 12-13 watts power and can process so much. Think about it if Peter's work comes even 1/100000000 times closer all shareholders will be very well off.
Neuron spiking has been observed in animals and offers advantages in terms of survival yet the evolution hasn't caught up yet. So in order for people to simulate the brain they will need a model that not only deals with sync and convolutional nets but will also require to process the data being generated on a extremely large scale. The current tech is obviously not of the ability to achieve this and hence comes the start-ups that dwelve into this area being the front runners for becoming the next google or Amazon.
Looking at top 20 holders some Indian names appear and the top names appear from US as opposed to that from AU.
This begs the question why did they choose to incorporate here in AUS. The answers could sometimes be simpler but I am of the opinion that this will give them large amount of research grants , tax benefits and also be free from US export laws which may prevent them from exporting all technology worldwide without some serious red tape.
Either way it is a good prospect and we would have to see how this pans out.
(20min delay)