DeepMind, the UK artificial intelligence group purchased by Google for £400m earlier this year, has revealed plans to create a broad alliance with the University of Oxford after acquiring two companies spun out of computer science projects at the elite academic institution.
The London-based group, now a department within the US technology group, said it had acquired Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, enterprises founded by Oxford professors. DeepMind did not disclose the size of the transactions, but people familiar with the matter said the deals are worth tens of millions of pounds.
The move was described by company executives as a broader effort by Google to invest in the UK’s scientific and academic sector, with DeepMind also establishing significant ties to the university’s computer science and engineering science departments.
This will see DeepMind employees lecturing at the university, students being offered internships at the company and researchers from both groups collaborating on artificial intelligence (AI) projects. Google will also make a “substantial contribution” to the university, a donation described by one person familiar with the matter as worth many millions.
DeepMind is led by co-founder Demis Hassabis, whose varied career has led him to be heralded as a chess prodigy, renowned video games designer, expert computer programmer and influential neuroscientist. He has previously said his vision is to create a “Manhattan project” for AI, using Google’s vast financial and computing resources to attract the world’s greatest minds on the subject.
“These are exciting times for artificial intelligence, and this partnership further cements the UK’s position in the vanguard of this increasingly impactful field,” said Mr Hassabis.
DeepMind is working on “general” AI, systems that behave like the human brain, which use “unstructured” information from their surroundings to make independent decisions and predictions. This is unlike most other AI systems, which rely on human programmers to attach “labels” to data in order for a computer to make sense of information.
Dark Blue Labs, led by Nando de Freitas and Phil Blunsom, is creating systems to understand “natural language” that would allow computers to comprehend the meaning of sentences and how people react to them.
Vision Factory, headed by Andrew Zisserman, is developing systems capable of the visual recognition of objects in the real word. This means, for example, giving robots three-dimensional awareness that can allow them to understand how a cup sits on a table.
All three computer science professors and the teams working under them will become DeepMind employees, but they will also retain their current roles and continue their research at Oxford.
The acquisition provides DeepMind with about 10 new employees, lifting its staff numbers to around 100. To obtain a job at the company, candidates usually have one or more PhDs, while also undergoing a rigorous process of seven interviews and two examinations.