Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 209 posts

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

#31

Post by spiderPig »

Oculus wrote: post #8
mjn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

piqued* my curiosity. Sorry, had to :)

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

#34

Post by tansey »

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…

I actually read this paper a couple weeks ago as part of a deep learning reading group that I co-run. While several of these authors are household names in the RL community, this paper was not actually that impressive to me.

The only real "deep" learning here is that they used a GPU library and stochastic gradient descent to perform Q-learning updates on a network with 3 large hidden layers. It was an interesting application paper, but I suspect that the Google acquisition is for something more novel than this work.

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

#35

Post by pkaye »

minor_nitwit wrote: post #33

I can't believe that they would pay $400M for a company without getting something more than just talent. They must have created something very impressive that will be able to plug into the Borg.

Better deal than $3 billion for a company that makes thermostats.

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

#36

Post by bhhaskin »

minor_nitwit wrote: post #33

I can't believe that they would pay $400M for a company without getting something more than just talent. They must have created something very impressive that will be able to plug into the Borg.

look how much facebook paid for instagram.

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

#38

Post by fchollet »

iandanforth wrote: post #32

Here's a talk the founder gave in 2010 for Singularity U about combining neuroscience and machine learning. http://vimeo.com/17513841

It seems that Google has now gone full Singularist. They jumped the shark when they hired Kurzweil.

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

#39

Post by cloudwalking »

rwissmann wrote: post #23
Oculus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Article has been updated; company is about 50 people.
Post reply on HN