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Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M
- sanxiyn 13y agoFYI, Shane Legg's theses was "Machine Super Intelligence". http://www.vetta.org/publications/ http://www.vetta.org/publications/
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoI'm really wondering where you have to go to grad-school for someone to approve a thesis that blatantly speculative.
- sanxiyn 13y agoUniversity of Lugano, apparently. I also quote, from the preface, "This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grants 2100-67712.0 and 200020-107616. Many funding agencies are not willing to support such blue-sky research. Their backing has been greatly appreciated."
- arethuza 13y agoI skimmed it and didn't think it was that bad - it's kind of interesting to see a thesis that allows reasonably informed speculation. I don't know enough about ML to say whether the core results are actually of any value. The title is a bit much but it does say "The title of this thesis is deliberately provocative".
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoI didn't say "speculative" as a bad thing. I meant it more with overtones of "brave" or "ballsy" or, let's just sum up, "heroic".
- arethuza 13y agoAh yes - I did wonder if I had misinterpreted your comment after I posted mine... :-)
- sieisteinmodel 13y agoWhatever the uni. He was working at IDSIA, one of the main contributors to deep learning. Also, his advisor, Markus Hutter, did some serious stuff on AGI.
- baddox 13y agoDid you read the paper? I skimmed it, and wouldn't describe it as "blatantly speculative." There are certainly predictions based on facts (or at least, claims which are believed to be facts, but I repeat myself), but I don't think those are out of place in a thesis.
- Oculus 13y ago$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.
- mjn 13y agoAs 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 the direction of either too incrementalist to too pie-in-the-sky. More specifically on the "methods" side, they have people who are known in both statistical ML, and in the recent resurgence of neural-networks known as "deep learning". You can discern some more about their general direction by looking at courses they've been involved with, talks they've given or sponsored, etc., but as far as I know (and I tried to probe a few months ago through a friend who knew someone there) their actual product / business / etc. hasn't really been leaked, or at least not leaked widely enough that I could find out about it.
- Oculus 13y agoThis 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!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- PhearTheCeal 13y agoIf the article is correct, they bought the team.
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- theboss 13y agoDang. $400million sounds like a lot for landing page. Only kidding. Best of luck to those guys. They sound very talented.
- midas007 13y agoExtracting 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.
- theboss 13y agoI don't know what this means. I understand the individual words....but not the meaning of your post
- kstop 13y agoThey'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.
- theboss 13y agoAhh I see. Thanks. I trust him. Nobody knows best like an anonymous stranger on the internet.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jaredmck 13y agoSo does anyone know what they actually do in more detail?
- midas007 13y agohttps://angel.co/deepmind-technologies-limited https://angel.co/deepmind-technologies-limited Looks like PayPal (tm) mafia extended family.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- karpathy 13y agoI 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. [0] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tansey 13y agoI 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.
- kordless 13y ago> surpasses a human expert on three of them I hazard it's not very impressed with your Space Invader score, either.
- lispsil 13y agoI suspect google wants to port this to their D-wav, probably sell API access to it. Rent an AI
- eru 13y agoCompare http://wavewatching.net/2014/01/18/scott-aaronson-again-resigns-as-chief-d-wave-critic-and-endorses-their-experiments/#Update_GQAI http://wavewatching.net/2014/01/18/scott-aaronson-again-resi... and (more directly) http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1643 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1643
- outside1234 13y agoIs Google drunk? Thats $4B in basically two weeks on unproven companies.
- bhouston 13y agoNest 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...
- kordless 13y agoThey have an assload of cash on hand and the singularity is coming at us like a freight train. I'd think they were drunk if they weren't snatching up everything relevant in sight.
- jackgavigan 13y ago> They have an assload of cash on hand... I wonder if they managed to pay for DeepMind out of funds that are "stuck" offshore (i.e. earnings from outside the US that can't be repatriated without incurring a big tax bill).
- andyjohnson0 13y agoProbably. Deepmind is a UK company based in London.
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoI never even considered that, probably very true.
- Beliavsky 13y ago"They have an assload of cash on hand" Companies with excess cash are supposed to pay dividends and/or buy back stock.
- 127001brewer 13y ago
- ams6110 13y agoThe missing piece for Google to become Skynet?
- 31reasons 13y agoRobotics 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. :)
- Thirdegree 13y agoOr maybe they're watching exactly the right amount. :D
- polarix 13y agoWhen you have the capability to achieve dreams as immense as Google can, it's best to reach for the most powerful dreams possible.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoWhat do you mean, maybe? The evidence is in: Google's founders have gone full hard-scifi cyber-god take-over-the-world on us.
- blazespin 13y agoHow do we know it was 400M?
- iandanforth 13y agoHere's a talk the founder gave in 2010 for Singularity U about combining neuroscience and machine learning. http://vimeo.com/17513841 http://vimeo.com/17513841
- fchollet 13y agoIt seems that Google has now gone full Singularist. They jumped the shark when they hired Kurzweil.
- psbp 13y agoI don't really understand the objective of those like Kurzweil. What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death.
- hack_edu 13y agoTo many, love.
- Tloewald 13y agoAt best, a copy of you living in VR gets to live until the sun explodes. Which at least is better defined than "heaven".
- stcredzero 13y ago1) The sun does not explode. It just swells to a red giant. This happens quickly for a star, once the process starts, but it's still much longer than a human lifespan. 2) Presumes our intelligence is deemed valuable enough to devote those resources to.
- JackFr 13y agoWell, when you scratch the surface, it's not really any better defined than heaven. You're gonna have to spec out 'copy', 'you' and 'living'.
- minor_nitwit 13y agoI 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.
- pkaye 13y agoBetter deal than $3 billion for a company that makes thermostats.
- JackFr 13y agoState of the art ML + thermostats ... I smell synergy ...
- bhhaskin 13y agolook how much facebook paid for instagram.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- oscargrouch 13y agoIf instagram decided to create a couple of features more.. that would be a real threat to facebook as the #1 social network.. With a lot of money to spend.. this was a good move. Acquisitions can also serve to kill the competition
- hawkharris 13y agoI watched a fascinating documentary about DeepMind's most popular product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QRvTv_tpw0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QRvTv_tpw0
- JulianMorrison 13y agoI know Shane Legg from his work with AIXI, the mathematical model of infinite general intelligence. That's some heavy hitters.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoI worked with Shane at Ben Goertzel's company Webmind about 12 years ago - a good guy. A little off topic, but I suspect that one reason to sell themselves to Google is Google's infrastructure, both in ability to easily run very large jobs and their very nice development environment.
- csense 13y agoThe DeepMind website [1] links to cofounder Demis Hassabis' biography on Wikipedia [2]. Read it. This guy is a world-class hacker! [1] http://deepmind.com http://deepmind.com [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
- jfields513 13y agoThat's a nice c.v., but he definitely wrote his own wikipedia article.
- diydsp 13y agoI'm usually skeptical of these kinds of vanity articles (and seeing many more lately), but this one kind of checks out [1]. It's got edits by many different IP addresses and handles stretching across nine years. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demis_Hassabis&dir=prev&action=history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demis_Hassabis&dir...
- nl 13y agoI guess DeepMind's AI Wikipedia bot works pretty well.
- yen223 13y agoHe did the AI for Black & White? My respect for him has just increased by an order of magnitude. Black & White's creature AI was nothing short of amazing.
- psykotic 13y agoMy second-hand impression is that Richard Evans is responsible for most of what actually shipped in the game's creature AI. As the Wikipedia article says, Demis only briefly held the title of Lead AI Programmer on the project.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoOhhh, did Google buy them? Or did the AI figure that the best place to launch world domination from was inside Google so it forged a letter from Larry and Sergey offering to acquire the company? :-)
- higherpurpose 13y agoLarry Page has been replaced by an android clone since the so called "throat operation". Don't you think it's a little weird that they've started buying all sorts of robot and AI companies lately to create the ultimate machine?
- z3phyr 13y agoAI vs Aliens from Space vs Zombies!! The future is exciting!!!
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoWe're not commenting at YouTube level. We're in sheer awe at someone having the chutzpah to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into realizing their scifi fever dreams.
- entendre 13y agoI purchase my fever dreams in dogecoin.
- DanAndersen 13y agoI see someone else has read Avogadro Corp ( http://avogadrocorp.com/ http://avogadrocorp.com/ ). I found that book to be one of the most unsettlingly plausible premises for an AI. In particular I liked that it didn't go the typical Hollywood idea of AI as being a "soul/homunculus conjured into a machine" but rather a very effective decision-making agent.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoYup, that is an awesome tale.
- lijman 13y agoMachine learning and big data startups will strike it rich in 2014!
- _random_ 13y agoYou mean those start-ups that were founded long enough to be one of the first to capitalize on these ideas? Like DeepMind that was founded in 2011?
- thrush 13y agoDid anybody else read this as "Goodbye Articial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M"? Google to Buy Google Buy GooBuy ~ Goodbye
- enscr 13y agoUpvoted but disagree on behalf of Youtube, Android, Keyhole, etc. Some exist independently, others are absorbed.
- hoggle 13y agoTo be fair, Youtube could have been so much more. For example they recently removed the video response feature while claiming the click-through rate was abysmal - it probably was because the focus of Youtube is more like "Newtube". TV now means on demand and broadcast via internet/web, simple and boring as that.
- enscr 13y agoYoutube would have died by itself. Or imagine what Yahoo would have done to it post acquisition. I know Apple would have called at iTube & put a price tag of $0.99 on all decent ones :)
- nashequilibrium 13y agoSo Deepmind $400M but Snapchat $4Billion? So Google thinks Snapchat is more important?
- gdahl 13y agoThere were a lot of pros a DeepMind. For example: Volodymyr Mnih, Andriy Mnih, Alex Graves, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Karol Gregor, Guillaume Desjardins, David Silver, and a bunch more I am forgetting.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mdeg 13y agoSo, Google's list so far: - Some top ML talent: Geoffrey Hinton, Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng. - One of D-Wave's quantum computers to establish their 'Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab'. - Creepy robot maker Boston Dynamics. - A stack of other robotics companies: Schaft.inc, Industrial Perception, Redwood Robotics, Meka Robotics, Molomni, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss. - DeepMind, obviously. Am I missing any?
- raldi 13y agoZagat
- andyjohnson0 13y agoRay Kurzweil
- wikke 13y agoNest to apply ML techniques to home automation.
- Sven7 13y agopretty sure a lot of cat herding is about to ensue
- sanxiyn 13y agoApparently Facebook also tried to acquire DeepMind. https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-DeepMind-Creates-Ethics-Board https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-Deep...
- yohui 13y agoAlso interesting that Google agreed to DeepMind's proposal to create an AI ethics board. Wonder how Facebook responded to that stipulation during negotiations.
- sushirain 13y agoGoogle ∩ Nest ∩ Boston Dynamics ∩ Ray Kurzweil ∩ Andrew Ng ∩ DeepMind = Domestic Robot?
- cLeEOGPw 13y ago= attempt of implementation of sci-fi sounding idea that will be rewarded even if it fails. It's is good.
- hoggle 13y agoThe price seems quite low, goes to show how bad most technologists are at bargaining.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- swalsh 13y agoI recently watched the interview with Eric Schmidt on CNBC. In it they asked about the singularity (as good as any main stream finance oriented television show can). The key quote I took away from it (and sorry this is from memory) was "We've had the algorithms for AI for years, but the big difference between now, and in the past is we finally have the computer power for it". My own speculation. One of the key concepts to come out of the experience of translation is "A billion is more than a million". When they thought they processed enough data, it still wasn't enough. They may be scaling that concept even larger. At the same time, quantum computers SHOULD be getting to the point where they pass classical computers, and its generally known that Google has had access to them. If Roses law is true, I'd speculate that Google is ramping up to take advantage.
- cLeEOGPw 13y ago> At the same time, quantum computers SHOULD be getting to the point where they pass classical computers, ... Where exactly would they pass classical computer? Legitimate question. Because I've read this (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1643 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1643) today, which shows quantum computers probably will not be that much better at NP problems than classical ones.
- Tenoke 13y ago>The DeepMind-Google ethics board, which DeepMind pushed for.. Damn, if DeepMind had to 'push' for an ethics board then that is a fairly bad sign. I am getting more worried. [0]https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-DeepMind-Creates-Ethics-Board https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-Deep...
- marvin 13y agoAt least someone pushed for it. It's reassuring to hear that the thought was on the radar at all.
- mej10 13y agoThis is my thought as well.
- orblivion 13y agoWhat's to say what is an ethical thing to do to an AI? Or that someone decades from now will be ethical? The most ethical thing would be to shut down the program.
- CmonDev 13y agoI am jealous: working on AI _and_ getting rich.
- donniezazen 13y agoHow do you know if you are talented enough to pursue an intricate field like Artificial Intelligence? Or is it merely a lot of hard work?
- _random_ 13y agoPick a camp: symbolic or sub-symbolic. If latter then do a neuroscience degree along with a computer science degree. Get an insight while experimenting with biological brain. Make a start-up that capitalizes on your new idea.
- donniezazen 13y agoGetting 2 degrees sounds like way too much work. How about reading a plenty of books and research papers? What do you mean by symbolic or sub-symbolic?
- _random_ 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Symbolic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Symboli... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Sub-symbolic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Sub-sym...
- w_t_payne 13y agoAgh! Crap! I almost got a job with them!
- _random_ 13y agoI feel sorry for you :(. Are you a developer or a scientist?
- w_t_payne 13y agoI am a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I generally bill myself as the "&" in R&D, bridging the gap between academic researchers & mathematicians and mainstream software engineering. I.e. I can do a bit of classifier design, but most of my focus tends to be on build systems, automated test systems, parameter tuning, data quality monitoring and all the nuts-and-bolts stuff that most researchers don't want to be bothered with. I am way too OCD to spend my day producing "research quality" code, and too wary of BS for my output to be just research reports and academic papers. I prefer shipping product, if you know what I mean? I lost interest in DeepMind when I could not figure out what their business was after a couple of interviews. (The startup that I was previously working for had just run out of money). More fool me. Heh.
- 11001 13y agoWhat impression did they give you during the interviews? In retrospect, do you think that was their whole goal, to get acquihired by Google?
- w_t_payne 13y agoYes, in retrospect, I think that was the goal. They were interested in me for work on their machine vision product (my area of expertise), but the spiel was very much around how they had built up one of the world's best machine learning research groups. Over the years I have seen many great academics fail to produce much commercially, so perhaps I was less impressed with that than I should have been. :-)
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- myzerox 13y agoWell, Vicarious is still independent... http://vicarious.com/ http://vicarious.com/
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoThe question is, what is Google going to do with all these robotics and AI companies? And please no singularity/skynet/robot uprising BS, I'm expecting more from HN than youtube level comments.
- DanBC 13y agoSelf driving cars? Edit: and search is an AI problem. You have a user entering a string and you have to work out what they expect to see returned. I think there might be feedback loops in Google's current system, so maybe better AI would help.
- prottmann 13y agoObviously google try to build things for every aspect of our life. Intelligent machines in the our Homes, Cars, at Work. We will not see them in the near future, but 5 or 10 Years google will start a product offensive.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoSingularity is not BS, and I'm pretty sure they want to make it happen. It would be a shame if Google wanted all this AI talent to improve ad revenue or just for self-driving cars. I for one hope they are not that short-sighted. I think, hope, that with "all these robotics and AI companies", they literally want to build the future of mankind.
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoSingularity is BS because there's no such thing as "machine surpassing human intelligence". Human intelligence is not a one dimensional measurement that can be "surpassed". There's not much challenge to write AI that surpasses all humans in IQ tests. You can't even say if one human surpassed other human in intelligence, how are you gonna measure machine? In the same way every one of us are intelligent in some specific areas, AIs are and will be intelligent in their own. We, humans, only have many things in common, because we all have the same body, that makes us to have the same physical needs and what results in relatable experiences that we call "common sense". If we, you an I, didn't have same types of bodies, even if we both could speak english, we could barely understand each other. That's why there will never be a point where AI will become "unpredictable". It's just pop culture meme for people that don't want to think it through the details, sitting in the same page with UFO, spirits and other I want to believe crap.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- z3phyr 13y agoProgrammers might be one of the unfortunate firsts that can be replaced by AI! No programming at all everything self programs itself!
- jotm 13y agoVisual programming ala Yahoo Pipes, with the computer creating the code itself in the background. Would be pretty cool...
- z3phyr 13y agoAnd then, programmers will be like john carmack, building spaceships and rockets, while the computer does its job.
- kamaal 13y agoIf one can write a program that can generate any program, the world as we know it would be such a different place protecting my job will be least of my worries. This is basically the equivalent of a run away program what can create better versions of itself automatically. Nearly every human's job is at stake here.
- theRhino 13y agoDeepMind seems awfully close to DeepThought - maybe its $400m for the answer to life, the universe and everything? Would seem to be a good deal on those terms..
- z3phyr 13y agoVideo Games with Emergent AI, and Machine learning will be next mainstream AI thing. Academic AI and Game AI might somewhat merge...
- zwdr 13y agoAI and robotics... I for one am excited.
- bachback 13y agoI've met one of the founders a while ago. pretty smart people, but it seems to me that the whole purpose of silicon valley is advertising. not a world I want to live in. google establishing an ethics committee for proper AI? give me a break, we know how well that works.
- jonknee 13y agoI don't know anyone on the team, but Om Malik was not impressed and he's usually reliable: https://twitter.com/om/status/427653907766972416 https://twitter.com/om/status/427653907766972416 > A $400 million talent acquisition with little talent. That's how Google rolls now! There's also word that it was more than $400m, perhaps as high as $500m. That's a lot for talent any way you slice it.
- m_ke 13y agoHow is he qualified to judge ML talent? DeepMind wasn't just a 3 man team, Yann Lecun posted on G+ that 3 of his PhD students were on the team and I've heard that they were recruiting more people.
- amaks 13y agoExactly. Interesting, Yann LeCun in his G+ post (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/LnKBPi9cCWm https://plus.google.com/u/0/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/LnKBPi9cCWm) explicitly mentioned that the acquired ML scientists have been focused in reinforcement learning. Also, they have published ArXiv paper on the subject: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf.
- kdavis 13y agoA search on arxiv for DeepMind[1] finds that in the last months they have been publishing some first-class stuff. [1] http://search.arxiv.org:8081/?query=DeepMind&in= http://search.arxiv.org:8081/?query=DeepMind&in=
- hgsigala 13y agoCan someone shed some light on the reasoning behind paying 3.2 billion for Nest (thermostats) and only 400 million for DeepMind (artificial intelligence). Is it really that Nest was a consumer, revenue positive company?
- arca_vorago 13y agoWell, if you keep in mind that Google's game is data collection, it makes sense that a product that will give them an even more detailed look into the life of people will help them monetize that somehow at somepoint. (I have been doing lots of macro level SEO research lately and have come to the conclusion that Google is getting ready to make some big moves in the near future.)