Why did Google pay over $500 million for a tiny London startup that barely had any products?
DeepMind had fewer than 75 employees and no commercial product - but Google saw the future.
The answer
DeepMind was founded in London in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman with the ambitious mission to 'solve intelligence and then use that to solve everything else.' In January 2014, Google acquired DeepMind for a reported $500–650 million, making it one of the largest AI acquisitions in history at that time. The startup had demonstrated remarkable results in teaching neural networks to play Atari games at superhuman levels using only raw pixel input. DeepMind went on to create AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and numerous other breakthroughs, becoming one of the world's most influential AI research labs.
Source: The Guardian
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