From: on behalf of Ben Goertzel
Sent: Monday, January 27, 2014 5:08 AM
To: Jeffrey Epstein
Subject: Google buys Deep Mind ...
Wow, did you see this?
http://recode.net/2014/01/26/exclusive-google-to-buy-artificial-intelligence-startup-deepmind-for-400m/
That is the company I often pointed out as being the most likely competitor to OpenCog in really pushing toward AGI...
And I happen to know (from my friendship with their co-founder Shane Legg, who will now become a very wealthy
Google employee) that Deep Mind has *nothing* technologically besides some interesting proto-AGI R&D code....
Nothing that works, really.
So it's pretty much an acqui-hire .... And 50 programmers for $400M
is a really fat acquihire; $1M - $2M per programmer is way more typical... this shows that Google values anything Al or
robotics ish quite a lot these days...
One read of the overall situation would be "Google is going to win the race to AGI" -- they have a lot of $5 and are
looking to hire the entire Al and robotics field... Maybe they will change their name to CyberDyne systems (cf
"Terminator" ...)
OTOH, more money doesn't •always• win; having the right set of ideas also means a lot.... Linux, not Windows,
dominates supercomputing and
the Internet.... And they are not doing proto-AGI within Google X,
they're doing it in their main product dev division, which brings a complicated set of compromises... Hmmm...
Interesting times !!!
more later...
ben
Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org
"In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane". -- Capt.
James T. Kirk
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