As far as I can tell, quite a few ML people can vouch for someone at the company (I know someone there second-hand myself), but the details of what precisely they're doing have been kept fairly well under wraps. The broad parameters are "something to do with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", which is a field that tries to straddle the fine line between contemporary AI and sci-fi AI, without erring too far in th…
This has seriously piqued my curiosity. Do you think Google bought the product or the team? $400M is a big chunk of change for ~3 people. Edit: peaked --> piqued, thanks to spiderPig!
$400M for a company I've never heard before is quite surprising. Could someone who participates in the machine learning community share any insights or facts they have on the company? Other than the founders' histories, the article doesn't do much justice to the pricetag.
As far as I can tell, quite a few ML people can vouch for someone at the company (I know someone there second-hand myself), but the details of what precisely they're doing have been kept fairly well under wraps. The broad parameters are "something to do with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", which is a field that tries to straddle the fine line between contemporary AI and sci-fi AI, without erring too far in th…
I'm not so sure their technology is as futuristic as everyone thinks it is. If I had to take an educated guess, I would say it's some powerful AI that makes their knowledge graph smarter. Currently Google's Knowledge Graph uses more structured data sets and depends on a mechanism like this: http://www.zachvanness.com/nanobird_relevancy_engine.pdf
But the real challenge is to make the knowledge graph update in real time and take meaning from something as unstructured as a blog post or an email. And to do something like that requires some really unique AI.
This has seriously piqued my curiosity. Do you think Google bought the product or the team? $400M is a big chunk of change for ~3 people. Edit: peaked --> piqued, thanks to spiderPig!
If the article is correct, they bought the team.
Could 3 people be worth that much? This ranks as one of the ten most expensive acquisitions by Google[1].
As far as I can tell, quite a few ML people can vouch for someone at the company (I know someone there second-hand myself), but the details of what precisely they're doing have been kept fairly well under wraps. The broad parameters are "something to do with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", which is a field that tries to straddle the fine line between contemporary AI and sci-fi AI, without erring too far in th…
I'm not so sure their technology is as futuristic as everyone thinks it is. If I had to take an educated guess, I would say it's some powerful AI that makes their knowledge graph smarter. Currently Google's Knowledge Graph uses more structured data sets and depends on a mechanism like this: http://www.zachvanness.com/nanobird_relevancy_engine.pdf But the real challenge is to make the knowledge graph update in real ti…
Oh, I'm decidedly agnostic on whether it really is futuristic AI. Just there is some buzz around it, and some of the people involved in it are definitely legit, and have also involved themselves in the "AGI" community, which leads to such speculation (which they've pretty deliberately cultivated). That doesn't prove they've Solved AI for any sci-fi-ish notion of Solved AI. They could just have some good but in the big picture fairly modest knowledge-graph tech, or they could even have not-that-good knowledge-graph tech with great PR! Hard to say without knowing any details.
Dang. $400million sounds like a lot for landing page. Only kidding. Best of luck to those guys. They sound very talented.
Extracting millions out of acquirees should be done with the least possible investment. Seriously, if you can rook 'em in some way that can't blow back, go for it.
I don't know what this means. I understand the individual words....but not the meaning of your post
I remember that they had an impressive demo at the NIPS Deep Learning Workshop in December (probably a highlight for me and a few people I talked to afterwards) of a reinforcement learning agent playing Atari 2600 Games where the input consisted of an image that was fed through a Convolutional Neural Network. There is a paper on Arxiv that describes the approach ("Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning"[0]) but unfortunately I don't think they made the videos available.
Deep Mind has a whole bunch of talented and serious people so this is an exciting acquisition.
This has seriously piqued my curiosity. Do you think Google bought the product or the team? $400M is a big chunk of change for ~3 people. Edit: peaked --> piqued, thanks to spiderPig!
If the article is correct, they bought the team.
400 millions for a 3 person startup that don't even have a proper web-site and is not in wikipedia seems crazy. But then again Google knows a little more about future value than me.
Extracting millions out of acquirees should be done with the least possible investment. Seriously, if you can rook 'em in some way that can't blow back, go for it.
I don't know what this means. I understand the individual words....but not the meaning of your post
They're saying that they think Google was conned - or at least manipulated into a higher price than the company is worth.
This is the Internet, so I'm sure this random opinion is both well-informed and valid.