
Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M - jamesjyu
http://recode.net/2014/01/26/exclusive-google-to-buy-artificial-intelligence-startup-deepmind-for-400m/
======
karpathy
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]) 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)

~~~
tansey
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.

~~~
bliti
This deep learning group you mentioned. May anyone join in?

~~~
tansey
Sorry, it's for UT Austin PhD students only.

------
mdeg
So, 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?

~~~
andyjohnson0
Ray Kurzweil

------
ChuckMcM
Ohhh, 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
Larry Page has been replaced by an android clone since the so called "throat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
AI vs Aliens from Space vs Zombies!! The future is exciting!!!

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

~~~
psbp
I 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.

~~~
Tloewald
At best, a copy of you living in VR gets to live until the sun explodes. Which
at least is better defined than "heaven".

~~~
JackFr
Well, 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'.

~~~
TeMPOraL
We have some ideas on how to make "copy" work, and what "you" and "living" is.
We also know that we can in principle achieve it by our own strength as a
civilization. We can see the path from "here" to "there". Which seems much
better defined than heaven.

------
Oculus
$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
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
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!

~~~
PhearTheCeal
If the article is correct, they bought the team.

~~~
aortega
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
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.

------
Tenoke
>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-
Deep...](https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-DeepMind-
Creates-Ethics-Board)

~~~
marvin
At least _someone_ pushed for it. It's reassuring to hear that the thought was
on the radar at all.

~~~
mej10
This is my thought as well.

------
sanxiyn
FYI, Shane Legg's theses was "Machine Super Intelligence".
[http://www.vetta.org/publications/](http://www.vetta.org/publications/)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I'm really wondering where you have to go to grad-school for someone to
approve a thesis that blatantly speculative.

~~~
arethuza
I 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
I 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
Ah yes - I did wonder if I had misinterpreted your comment after I posted
mine... :-)

------
JulianMorrison
I know Shane Legg from his work with AIXI, the mathematical model of infinite
general intelligence. That's some heavy hitters.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I 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
The 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)

~~~
yen223
He 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
My 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.

------
sanxiyn
Apparently Facebook also tried to acquire DeepMind.
[https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-
Deep...](https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-DeepMind-
Creates-Ethics-Board)

~~~
yohui
Also interesting that Google agreed to DeepMind's proposal to create an AI
ethics board. Wonder how Facebook responded to that stipulation during
negotiations.

------
outside1234
Is Google drunk? Thats $4B in basically two weeks on unproven companies.

~~~
kordless
They 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
_> 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
Probably. Deepmind is a UK company based in London.

------
gdahl
There 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.

------
swalsh
I 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
> 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.

------
jonknee
I 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
How 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
Exactly. 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).

------
minor_nitwit
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.

~~~
bhhaskin
look how much facebook paid for instagram.

~~~
oscargrouch
If 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

------
thrush
Did anybody else read this as "Goodbye Articial Intelligence Startup DeepMind
for $400M"?

    
    
      Google to Buy
       Google Buy
         GooBuy ~ Goodbye

~~~
enscr
Upvoted but disagree on behalf of Youtube, Android, Keyhole, etc.

Some exist independently, others are absorbed.

~~~
hoggle
To 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
Youtube 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 :)

------
bachback
I'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.

------
kdavis
A 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=)

------
sushirain
Google ∩ Nest ∩ Boston Dynamics ∩ Ray Kurzweil ∩ Andrew Ng ∩ DeepMind =
Domestic Robot?

~~~
cLeEOGPw
= attempt of implementation of sci-fi sounding idea that will be rewarded even
if it fails.

It's is good.

------
theboss
Dang. $400million sounds like a lot for landing page. Only kidding. Best of
luck to those guys. They sound very talented.

~~~
midas007
Extracting 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
I don't know what this means. I understand the individual words....but not the
meaning of your post

~~~
kstop
They'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
Ahh I see. Thanks. I trust him. Nobody knows best like an anonymous stranger
on the internet.

------
z3phyr
Programmers might be one of the unfortunate firsts that can be replaced by AI!
No programming at all everything self programs itself!

~~~
jotm
Visual programming ala Yahoo Pipes, with the computer creating the code itself
in the background. Would be pretty cool...

~~~
z3phyr
And then, programmers will be like john carmack, building spaceships and
rockets, while the computer does its job.

------
ams6110
The missing piece for Google to become Skynet?

~~~
31reasons
Robotics 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. :)

~~~
polarix
When you have the capability to achieve dreams as immense as Google can, it's
best to reach for the most powerful dreams possible.

------
CmonDev
I am jealous: working on AI _and_ getting rich.

------
myzerox
Well, Vicarious is still independent...
[http://vicarious.com/](http://vicarious.com/)

------
w_t_payne
Agh! Crap! I almost got a job with them!

~~~
_random_
I feel sorry for you :(. Are you a developer or a scientist?

~~~
w_t_payne
I 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
What 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
Yes, 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. :-)

------
nashequilibrium
So Deepmind $400M but Snapchat $4Billion? So Google thinks Snapchat is more
important?

~~~
mdeg
Not more important, more profitable. DeepMind is an investment, SnapChat is a
revenue raiser. And a big ball of users to foist G+ on.

~~~
catshirt
consider also that it's not only Google's opinion that affects the price tag.

------
hoggle
The price seems quite low, goes to show how bad most technologists are at
bargaining.

------
hgsigala
Can 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
Well, 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.)

------
theRhino
DeepMind 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..

------
jaredmck
So does anyone know what they actually do in more detail?

~~~
midas007
[https://angel.co/deepmind-technologies-limited](https://angel.co/deepmind-
technologies-limited)

Looks like PayPal (tm) mafia extended family.

------
donniezazen
How 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_
Pick 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
Getting 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_
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Symboli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Symbolic)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Sub-
sym...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Sub-symbolic)

------
z3phyr
Video Games with Emergent AI, and Machine learning will be next mainstream AI
thing. Academic AI and Game AI might somewhat merge...

------
blazespin
How do we know it was 400M?

------
lijman
Machine learning and big data startups will strike it rich in 2014!

~~~
_random_
You 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?

------
zwdr
AI and robotics... I for one am excited.

------
cLeEOGPw
The 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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Singularity 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
Singularity 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.

~~~
grondilu
> You can't even say if one human surpassed other human in intelligence, how
> are you gonna measure machine?

It's not because something is difficult to measure that it does not exist(1).
Even if you don't believe in IQ tests, you gotta admit that those people
Google just hired are more intelligent than the average Joe. They sure are
more intelligent than me anyway. Probably more intelligent than you as well.

In the same way, the idea that one day a machine could be more intelligent
than any human being would be very real the day a machine will write
scientific papers, program its own code, design high-tech devices, win a Nobel
price and stuff like that.

This machine would be more intelligent than Demis Hassabis (the founder of
DeepMind) for exactly the same reasons that I can say that Demis Hassabis is
more intelligent than me: he does more intelligent things.

1: for example, the famous conundrum "how long is the coast of Britain?" does
not suggest that Britain has no coast.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
> It's not because something is difficult to measure that it does not
> exist(1).

No, I don't say that it doesn't exists. What I say is that intelligence is not
something to be expressed in one number, it doesn't work that way.
Intelligence is more like NxN matrix of numbers, where each number in a matrix
represent individual skill in some specific task. As for your example of
Google employee and average Joe, what you mean by more intelligent is that the
sum of all of that NxN matrix number for that employee is larger than of the
average Joe. However if you take some particular numbers, Joe might still have
them higher. For the simplest example the average Joe will know his house
better than the Google employee who hasn't even been at Joe's house. And the
same is for AI, just the number of that supposed intelligence matrix will be
completely different than that of human. AI without human body, human body
needs and without hormones to control his behavior will never be anything like
human to be compared to them.

So in the end what you say I also think is true, especially about machines
writing scientific papers and generally doing science already out of grasp for
human mind. My problem I guess is the measurement problem.

If someone would say "singularity will be when machines will manipulate
mathematical concepts and invent/discover and prove theorems that no human
mathematician alive can understand" I would agree. But if they say "machine is
more intelligent than any human" I can't agree. That statement makes as much
sense as statement "singularity will be when apples will be more fruit than
any banana".

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _What I say is that intelligence is not something to be expressed in one
> number, it doesn 't work that way._

But nobody in the singularity field says that intelligence is one-dimensional
quality! It's a strawman.

It reminds me of a common accusation that "computer people" have subpar
worldview because they "reason in 0s and 1s, and the world is not binary", to
which I say that actually "computer people"'s view is superior because they
figured that out long ago and developed proper methods to quantify and deal
with uncertainty.

> _Intelligence is more like NxN matrix of numbers, where each number in a
> matrix represent individual skill in some specific task._

This is also not a good model, because what we usually mean by intelligence
are reasoning capabilities, not e.g. motor skills. You don't say about a
surgeon that he is smart, because he can manipulate a blade with great
precision; we say he's exceptionally skilled.

> _For the simplest example the average Joe will know his house better than
> the Google employee who hasn 't even been at Joe's house._

Put Average Joe and Google Employee a house they have never seen before and
see which one will learn how to navigate faster - that's a way to measure
intelligence. Not the knowledge, but the ability to process and use it.

> _If someone would say "singularity will be when machines will manipulate
> mathematical concepts and invent/discover and prove theorems that no human
> mathematician alive can understand" I would agree. But if they say "machine
> is more intelligent than any human" I can't agree._

Saying "machine more intelligent than human" is just a shortcut for saying
"machine that is able to reason about the world faster, better, with less
biases than human; which will manipulate mental concepts and prove theorems
out of reach for humans, as well as invent better technology, tackle human
social problems better than humans do, etc. etd.".

~~~
cLeEOGPw
> This is also not a good model, because what we usually mean by intelligence
> are reasoning capabilities, not e.g. motor skills.

Yes, the model is not good, I agree. But your understanding of intelligence
incorrectly. You think that intelligence is a rate of learning. Or in
neuroscience terms, brain plasticity. So, first, plasticity is largest at
birth and gradually decreases as brain matures. This means that newborn would
be "more intelligent" than 50yo man. Secondly, a fast rate of learning is not
necessarily a good thing. If you ever worked with neural networks, you'd know
that when training it, you can adjust at what rate the weights in artificial
neurons would change. If you make fast rate, for one, network quickly
overlearns, meaning he becomes too specialized and adjusted to exact cases he
experienced, and secondly, it can quickly "forget" what he has learned. Slow
learning rate makes it longer to learn, but also is more "stubborn" and
doesn't give of on old beliefs so easily either.

On the other hand, as you said, knowledge also does not mean intelligence. If
it cannot learn from it's mistakes, it is surely not intelligent. So I'd say
intelligence is a combination of experience and plasticity.

> Saying "machine more intelligent than human" is just a shortcut for saying
> "machine that is able to reason about the world faster, better, with less
> biases than human; which will manipulate mental concepts and prove theorems
> out of reach for humans, as well as invent better technology, tackle human
> social problems better than humans do, etc. etd.".

So in the other words machine becoming more proficient in some very specific
skill or multiple skills. Yes, that is common sense.

It's not that I disagree with the core idea of singularity, I just find it
pointless and unnecessary. Some might say "it brings attention to the field",
but I'm not really sure it helps AI research, since it attracts the wrong kind
of people that would make actual research.

------
hawkharris
I 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)

