Google buys DeepMind
Google pays around £400 million for a three-year-old London research company with no products; frontier AI research becomes a thing the largest companies own.
what had to happen · 31 events back to 1943
Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. Direct influences are marked.
00 · One neuron · 1
I · Foundations · 9
- 1948A mathematical theory of communication
- 1949Cells that fire together wire together
- 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
- 1958The perceptron learns
- 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
- 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
- 1965Moore's law
- 1969Perceptrons
- 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation
W1 · The first winter · 2
II · Connection · 3
W2 · The second winter · 6
III · Statistics and data · 7
- 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
- 1999The first GPU
- 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
- 2007CUDA
- 2009ImageNet
- 2010Rectified linear units
- 2010DeepMind is foundeddirect
IV · Deep learning · 3
- 2012Dropout
- 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
- 2013Deep Q-networks play Ataridirect
On 26 January 2014 Google agreed to buy DeepMind for a sum reported at about £400 million, or around $650 million, its largest European acquisition. DeepMind had roughly seventy-five employees, no revenue and one published result, the Atari-playing network of a month earlier. Facebook had tried to buy it first. The deal included, at Demis Hassabis's insistence, an ethics board and a promise that the technology would not be used for military purposes.
The price was a signal. Google had already bought Geoffrey Hinton's company and hired Andrew Ng, and its rivals responded: Facebook founded FAIR under Yann LeCun in December 2013, Baidu hired Ng in 2014, and the talent market for deep-learning researchers, which had been a few dozen people, became a bidding war. The frontier of the field, which had been in universities, moved into a handful of companies with the compute and the salaries to hold it.
Elon Musk, an early DeepMind investor, later said the sale was what convinced him that a counterweight was needed, and in December 2015 he helped found OpenAI to be one.
what it led to · 11 events downstream, through 2026
Built on it directly:
- 2015OpenAI is foundedIV
And, through them, by era: