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Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

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Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#21

Post by objclxt »

aortega wrote: post #17
PhearTheCeal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're mixing up two types of acquisitions here.

There is a difference between Snapchat being worth $3 billion and Nest being worth $3 billion. The former gets the valuation based on users, the latter on talent and intellectual property.

Ditto here: $400 million is not buying you users, it's buying you raw talent and IP. Users can go off to another service in a blink of an eye - IP can't (talent can, but you can often structure the deal so that it won't for some time).

This could still be a terrible deal (I'm sure there are some people at Google still a little sore over Motorola, where the IP was valued far more than it ended up being worth), but for very different reasons.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#22

Post by ForHackernews »

aortega wrote: post #17
PhearTheCeal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, obviously if they don't have a trendy iOS app and a twitter presence, they couldn't possibly be worth anything! /s

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#23

Post by rwissmann »

Oculus wrote: post #13
PhearTheCeal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]. 1: http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/14/where-nest-ranks-among-goo...

Those three are just the co-founders. The whole team seems to be much bigger. The arxiv article linked above cites seven names already.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#24

Post by theboss »

kstop wrote: post #18
theboss wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahh I see. Thanks. I trust him. Nobody knows best like an anonymous stranger on the internet.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#26

Post by Thirdegree »

31reasons wrote: post #25
ams6110 wrote: post #20

The missing piece for Google to become Skynet?

Robotics companies and now AI companies, Google seems to have much higher ambitions than the internet. May be they watching too many sci-fi movies in their 20% time. :)

Or maybe they're watching exactly the right amount. :D

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#27

Post by bhouston »

outside1234 wrote: post #19

Is Google drunk? Thats $4B in basically two weeks on unproven companies.

Nest is available in every Home Depot, and fairly prominently. It has a product and it must have sales to some degree.

Deep Mind on the other hand...

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#28

Post by [deleted] »

karpathy wrote: post #16

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]) b…

[deleted]

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#29

Post by kawera »

PhearTheCeal wrote: post #11
Oculus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or some patents.
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