The Swiss AI startup Ononowhich has two Viennese founders, Kaiyue Li and Marko Göls, has secured a high six-figure angel investment. The young company is developing autonomous cognitive AI. The goal is to free the AI industry from “frozen intelligence” by creating a proprietary operating system for cognition.
“We are going beyond the current limits of AI”
“With the world’s first “Progressive AI”, we are surpassing the current limits of AI,” says the Onono founding team around CEO Kaiyue Li and Chief Commercial Officer (CBO) Marko Göls. The two developed their idea and vision during their joint collaboration, which has already lasted three years. Göls was previously CEO of the Viennese creative agency Digitalsunray. Li was previously a senior AI architect there.
During their joint development of complex multi-agent systems, the two men identified the major limitations of current generative AI. With Onono, they want to overcome these obstacles. To do this, they are developing a “digital subject”, an autonomous AI that operates in a continuous cognitive loop.
Onono fights “Frozen Intelligence”
“This AI does more than calculate. Based on biological principles such as autopoiesis (self-creation) and swarm intelligence, it develops a continuous understanding of events, time, causality and itself, and continually improves, independently or in collaboration with humans. This represents a breakthrough towards a new form of cognitive autonomy: AI rewrites, adapts and expands its own model of the world through constant interaction,” explain the two founders.
With its technology, Onono wants to solve the problem of massive but ultimately static “Frozen Intelligence” models currently on the market. According to the startup, conventional intelligence systems become rigid after training, suffer from memory lapses, systemic degradations and hallucinations, and passively wait as reactive tools for prompts. Onono’s cognitive AI aims to overcome these limitations.
A startup develops a “cognitive advice model”
“Our vision is deeply rooted in the concept of “Viennese digital humanism” and we attach great importance to European values,” say Li and Göls. The interdisciplinary team brings together philosophy, mathematics, business, art and engineering. In order to optimally position the startup among international deep-tech investors, the founders registered Onono AI AG in Zurich. They thus wish to guarantee uncompromising alignment on data security and regulatory stability.
With this new capital, Onono wishes to advance the development of its architecture. The focus is on the new “cognitive counseling model”. The system acts like a senior partner in a large consulting firm. To relieve enterprise customers of fears of loss of data sovereignty, Onono creates an architecture that technologically decouples the customer’s fact structures (Project Semantic Net) from the solution logic and intuition learned from AI (Cognitive Personality Net). The client retains absolute data sovereignty while the digital subject simultaneously builds an intelligent knowledge and co-learning architecture.
