Andrew Garazha (the firm's Senior Analyst) declared that the project aimed "through iterative releases and updates to create a piece of software capable of making autonomous investment decisions.
[5] Michael Osborne, a University of Oxford associate professor in machine learning, found it is "a gimmick to call that an actual board member".
"[9] Florian Möslein, a law professor at the University of Marburg, wrote in 2018 that "Vital has widely been acknowledged as the 'world's first artificial intelligence company director'".
[4] Vice journalist Jason Koebler suggested that the software did not have any article intelligence capabilities and concluded "VITAL can’t talk, and it can’t hear, and it can’t be a real, functional executive of a company.
[8] However, in a 2017 interview to The Nikkei, Dmitry Kaminskiy, managing partner of Deep Knowledge Ventures, stated that VITAL had observer status on the board and no voting rights.
[11] University of Sheffield computer science professor Noel Sharkey said of VITAL, "On first sight, it looks like a futuristic idea but on reflection it is really a little bit of publicity hype.
[10] Michael Osborne, a University of Oxford associate professor in machine learning, found VITAL's appointment to be noncredible, saying it is "a bit of a gimmick to call that an actual board member".
Writing in the philosophical journal Multitudes, the academic Ariel Kyrou raised questions about the consequences of a mistake made by an algorithm recommending a dangerous investment.
[17] Simon Sharwood of The Register wrote that because the appointment of a software program to the board directors is not legally feasible in Hong Kong, there is "a strong whiff of stunt and/or promotion about this".
Drawing his analysis on an article from Business Insider,[19] Goldberg describes VITAL's decision-making predictiveness based "on surface pattern recognition and the identification of regularities and/or irregularities".