13 ms·

$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 th

by 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 ago
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 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 ago
  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!
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - PhearTheCeal 13y ago
    If the article is correct, they bought the team.
    - Oculus 13y ago
      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-googles-most-expensive-acquisitions/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/14/where-nest-ranks-among-goo...
      - rwissmann 13y ago
        Those three are just the co-founders. The whole team seems to be much bigger. The arxiv article linked above cites seven names already.
        cloudwalking 13y ago
        Article has been updated; company is about 50 people.
    - aortega 13y ago
      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.
      - objclxt 13y ago
        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.
      - ForHackernews 13y ago
        Yeah, obviously if they don't have a trendy iOS app and a twitter presence, they couldn't possibly be worth anything! /s
  - spiderPig 13y ago
    piqued* my curiosity. Sorry, had to :)
    - zimpenfish 13y ago
      "peaked" does at least make some sense as a replacement. I'd wager that it'll be common usage in a decade or two.
- zvanness 13y ago
  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 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. --mjn - I totally agree!
  - mjn 13y ago
    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.
  - nl 13y ago
    Deep learning is pretty impressive as a supplement to knowledge engineering approaches. Google's Deep Learning team were the people who developed the alogithm that discovered cats on YouTube (without training). Presumably this team had something that impressed them. The weakness to knowledge engineering approaches is that they tend to be fragile - they break badly with small holes in recorded knowledge. The IBM Watson team has a great video that showed how the different definitions of "fluid" and "liquid" meant a correct answer would have been missed if evidence collected in the answer verification phase of the DeepQA pipeline (no relation to Deep Learning) hadn't overridden it. Edit: Your(?) paper on your (?) relevancy engine is interesting. It seems like an application of skip-grams (which, ironically enough are heavily used by the DeepQA answer verification phase mentioned above).
adharmad 13y ago
Google should buy Wolfram Research. Wolfram Alpha seems to be pretty decent functionality.
achompas 13y ago
No facts about the company's work, but Yann LeCun says 3 of his former students + postdocs work at this company: https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151812982157143?stream_ref=10 https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151812982157143?... If they're hiring his students, they probably have a high level of talent (speaking as a former -- and present, starting tomorrow -- student).
pbreit 13y ago
They have apparently been cornering the market for certain types of PhD and other high-end talent in a bigger-than-niche ML/AI category.

by Oculus 13y ago

mjn 13y ago

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 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 ago
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!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- PhearTheCeal 13y ago
  If the article is correct, they bought the team.
  - Oculus 13y ago
    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-googles-most-expensive-acquisitions/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/14/where-nest-ranks-among-goo...
    - rwissmann 13y ago
      Those three are just the co-founders. The whole team seems to be much bigger. The arxiv article linked above cites seven names already.
      - cloudwalking 13y ago
        Article has been updated; company is about 50 people.
  - aortega 13y ago
    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.
    - objclxt 13y ago
      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.
    - ForHackernews 13y ago
      Yeah, obviously if they don't have a trendy iOS app and a twitter presence, they couldn't possibly be worth anything! /s
- spiderPig 13y ago
  piqued* my curiosity. Sorry, had to :)
  - zimpenfish 13y ago
    "peaked" does at least make some sense as a replacement. I'd wager that it'll be common usage in a decade or two.
zvanness 13y ago
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 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. --mjn - I totally agree!
- mjn 13y ago
  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.
- nl 13y ago
  Deep learning is pretty impressive as a supplement to knowledge engineering approaches. Google's Deep Learning team were the people who developed the alogithm that discovered cats on YouTube (without training). Presumably this team had something that impressed them. The weakness to knowledge engineering approaches is that they tend to be fragile - they break badly with small holes in recorded knowledge. The IBM Watson team has a great video that showed how the different definitions of "fluid" and "liquid" meant a correct answer would have been missed if evidence collected in the answer verification phase of the DeepQA pipeline (no relation to Deep Learning) hadn't overridden it. Edit: Your(?) paper on your (?) relevancy engine is interesting. It seems like an application of skip-grams (which, ironically enough are heavily used by the DeepQA answer verification phase mentioned above).

adharmad 13y ago

Google should buy Wolfram Research. Wolfram Alpha seems to be pretty decent functionality.

achompas 13y ago

No facts about the company's work, but Yann LeCun says 3 of his former students + postdocs work at this company: https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151812982157143?stream_ref=10 https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151812982157143?... If they're hiring his students, they probably have a high level of talent (speaking as a former -- and present, starting tomorrow -- student).

pbreit 13y ago

They have apparently been cornering the market for certain types of PhD and other high-end talent in a bigger-than-niche ML/AI category.