Google buys UK Artificial Intelligence Start-up Deep Mind for £400M

A former child chess prodigy and computer game designer from London has sold his company to Google for around £400m in one of the Internet giant’s largest European acquisitions.
Demis Hassabis, a computer scientist, is understood to have struck the deal with Google for his secretive start-up business Deep Mind Technologies, which specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) for computers.
Hassabis, 37, has built the company by bringing together neuroscientists and computer engineers in an effort to use technology and medical research to help machines to mimic the brain’s ability to improve performance. He previously led a study at University College London in 2009 that scanned human brains and found “just by looking at neural activity we were able to say what someone was thinking”.
Google founder Larry Page, who has expressed interest in making search commands easier by having an implant in the brain, is understood to have led the move to buy Deep Mind. Google is exploring smart technology that will enable it to go into space travel and create self-driving cars.
The website The Information claimed that Google had beaten Facebook to the acquisition and had sealed the deal after agreeing to set up an ethics board to ensure that the AI technology was not abused.

IBM recently pledged billion to fund Watson (above) - its own 'cognitive computing' machine that its hoped will one day understand the nuances of human language.

Hassabis is known within the computer gaming industry for having “a brain larger than a planet”. He began playing chess when he was four years old, reached Master Standard by the age of 13 and represented England.
He did his first work in the games industry only two years later when he entered a competition to design a clone for Space Invaders. Going into the industry seemed like “the perfect marriage between games and programing”, he has said.
By the age of 16 – having already completed his A-levels – Hassabis began working at games company Bullfrog and co-wrote the successful game Theme Park – which was based on an amusement park and released in 1994 - in his year off before going to the University of Cambridge. His student friends struggled to believe he was the author of such a successful product until they saw his name on the packaging.
After graduating with a triple first in computer science from Queen’s College, Hassabis quickly returned to the games industry and became a lead AI programmer at Lionhead Studios, the Surrey-based company founded by British computer games pioneer Peter Molyneux. Very soon afterwards the young graduate went off to set up his own business, Elixir Studios, where he was executive designer of a game called Republic: The Revolution, which attempted to recreate a “living, breathing city” and was nominated for a BAFTA.

Joe Mc Donagh and Demis Hassabis, in the green shirt, in 1999 (david Sandison)

Although he has accepted that the project was over-ambitious, he told games website CVG that he had always been prepared to take chances. “I’m actually more worried about not taking risks and playing safe, not pushing myself enough,” he said. “It’s a bit perverse I suppose, and asking for trouble. I’ve always been prepared to jump in at the deep end and see if I can swim or not.”
For many years, Hassabis was a successful competitor in the London-based Mind Sports Olympiad, taking part in its elite Pentamind contest – a sort of mental pentathlon. Hassabis was Pentamind champion in five of the first seven years after the Olympiad was founded in 1997. His success meant that he was described as “probably the best games player in history”. Hassabis is an expert in the Japanese board game Shogi and an accomplished poker player.
His next computer game Evil Genius, which was based on a Bond-style villain in an island lair, was more favourably received by critics. After selling the rights to publishers, Hassabis sold the studio and went into medical science in order to further pursue his interest in AI technology. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for his game designs.

Hassabis co-wrote 'Theme Park', which was released in 1994

As a cognitive neuroscientist he specialised in autobiographical memory (combining personal recollection and general knowledge) and amnesia. He investigated whether patients with lesions to the Hippocampus parts of their brains suffered damage to their imagination process as well as their memory recall. He completed his doctorate in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 at University College London and became a fellow at the college’s Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and a visiting scientist at MIT and Harvard.

'Evil Genius' was received favourably by critics

In 2012, he left academia to set up Deep Mind Technologies, developing technology for e-commerce and gaming and creating computer systems capable of playing computer games. The company, which was based in central London’s Russell Square before moving to Fenchurch Street, has a reputation for secrecy. Its aim is said to be to develop computers that think like humans. It is said to employ 50 people including co-founders Shane Legg, a 40-year-old New Zealander, and Mustafa Seleyman, a 29-year-old Briton.
Deep Mind’s investors include US Tesla car mogul Elon Musk, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel and the family of London app creator Nick d’Aloisio, who are all set for windfalls following the sale to Google. D’Aloisio, from south London, sold his news based app Summly to Yahoo! for a reported £19m early last year.

Embracing the Power of the Internet(Network Neutrality)

The internet is arguably the most powerful communication tool invented and certainly has had the greatest impact on society and business since the advent of the telephone.  As society transitioned from the telegraph to the telephone and radio to television, technology improved and grew more sophisticated.  However, issues of ownership and control were relatively straightforward.  Even if the electromagnetic spectrum for television transmission can be government regulated and divided up, those divisions are discreet and once allocated issues of control and ownership have been decided.  Further, regulation of the telephone industry has been economic; focused on concerns of monopoly power, but not due to any inherent uncertainty about who is providing a service on who’s transmission lines.

The internet is far different.  In fact, “one of the greatest things about the internet is that nobody really owns it” (Tyson).  The internet is essentially a collection of all connected computer networks and once information is transmitted from one point to another across these networks, its actual path is not predetermined.  Once leaving a user’s terminal, information or a request for information is eventually routed to and through the internet’s “backbone” of large fiber optic lines.  All of this data traffic is managed without human intervention incredibly effectively by routers (Tyson).  Public and private entities have cooperated over the years to build up the backbone lines and the current state of the internet is “a gigantic, sprawling agreement between companies to intercommunicate freely” (Tyson).

However, after investing billions of dollars in fiber optic lines and seeing billions of dollars of equity evaporate in the dot com and telecom stock market crash, cable and telecommunications firms are becoming dissatisfied with the aforementioned “sprawling agreement”.  Companies such as Bell South (now part of the SBC owned AT&T) “are considering "pay-as-you-go broadband" plans in which a consumer would pay more for streaming video, for example” (Searcey).  The internet has not traditionally embraced such price structures and heavy competition might limit the changes internet service providers (ISPs) can charge customers.  More importantly, “phone companies are also discussing ways to bill Internet content providers for premium delivery of their services” and “Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL [have considered placing] a small fee on [bulk] email to guarantee its delivery” (Searcey).  These proposed fees on providers of internet content have been met with vocal opposition from those who embrace the concept of “Internet/Network/Net Neutrality”.

Network Neutrality is “a term devised by Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu to support an open access theory of network regulation that holds that packet data networks such as the Internet access as common carriage should be just like traditional railroads and telephone networks” (Network Neutrality).  What this term means in practice, is that once a packet of data is on the internet, it should have the same access to the backbone lines as any other packet of data regardless of source, content, or owner.  It is highly likely that either some form of Network Neutrality will become law, or private owners of the internet backbone will begin charging some content providers for access or guaranteed delivery.