Google has made another high dollar acquisition. Recode.net reported this weekend that Google has purchased a secretive artificial intelligence company called DeepMind. According to Recode’s Liz Gannes, Google paid $400 million dollars for the company. While Google has now confirmed the acquisition mums the word on the dollar amount.
DeepMind was founded in London by Dennis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The company says they work on “general purpose learning algorithms,” with their first projects games, e-commerce and simulations. What they will be working on at Google specifically is unclear, however this move is clearly a talent acquisition and Recode also reported that Larry Page led the deal himself.
Google is stocking up in the AI department. In December of 2012 they brought Ray Kurzweil aboard as a Director of Engineering focused on machine learning and language processing. Kurzweil was the inventor of the original flatbed scanner, Optical character recognition and synthesizer’s that carry his name. It’s believed that the DeepMind team will work under Kurzweil and he was instrumental in getting Larry Page to bring them aboard.
