Artificial intelligence software firm Vicarious are finding investors in Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, among others.

The Wall Street Journal reported that in the second major cash-raising, the SpaceX billionaire, Elon Musk, and Facebook founder Zuckerberg took part in a $40m funding round. Ashton Kutcher, the actor who portrayed Steve Jobs, also took part in the investment.

Vicarious wants to replicate the neocortex of the human brain in computer code. The neocortex is the part of the brain that sees, controls the body and understands language and mathematics and the firm claims it's already produced software that can do the first part - interpreting images.

The firm has developed a visual perception system, according to its website, that looks at the contents of photos and videos in a similar manner to the way the brain does. The next step will be creating a computer that can understand textures as well as shapes and objects, said co-founder Scott Phoenix .

The company has rather lofty ambitions. It hopes to build computers that can learn to cure diseases, create cheap renewable energy and do most of the jobs that people currently do.

“We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he said.