Google Pays for UK Intelligence

Tech giant will write a $500 million cheque for the British artificial intelligence company called DeepMind. Media reports reveal that Google has been scrapping with Facebook in an attempt to take control of DeepMind, and its win means that the company can compete against other tech giants who all try to focus on deep learning.


For example, Facebook recently hired NYU Professor Yann LeCunn to lead the company’s new artificial intelligence lab. IBM’s Watson supercomputer is currently working on deep learning as well, and even Yahoo recently acquired photo analysis startup called LookFlow to lead its new deep learning project.

As for DeepMind, the company was established by neuroscientist Demis Hassabis in cooperation with Skype and Kazaa developer Jaan Tallin and researcher Shane Legg. Industry observers believe that DeepMind’s co-founders will join futurist Ray Kurzweil, who was hired a year ago as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing. It is known that Kurzweil is currently working on a search engine “so advanced that it could become a cybernetic friend”.

The chances are that Google will have to agree to establish an ethics board in order to make sure that DeepMind’s artificial intelligence technology is not abused. Unfortunately, so far it is unclear what exactly DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tech does. The company’s website is just a landing page containing a vague description which says that DeepMind is building general-purpose learning algorithms for simulations, e-commerce, and games.