Google acquires to more AI firms in the UK

Google’s DeepMind team, founded in 2011 and acquired by Google earlier this year, recently hired members of two artificial intelligence companies that were birthed by Oxford University. The two companies are named Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory. According to the Dark Blue Labs website, the company focuses on “learning deep structured and unstructured representations of data to make intelligent products, including natural language understanding, a reality,” while Vision Factory builds object and text recognition technology.

Google has expanded its artificial intelligence research team, acquiring two Oxford University spin-off companies specialising in machine learning and computer vision. Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory and their seven key researchers will be added to Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence research company – another British artificial intelligence startup which the search giant acquired in January. “We are thrilled to welcome these extremely talented machine learning researchers to the Google DeepMind team and are excited about the potential impact of the advances their research will bring,” wrote Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. Google’s DeepMind is working on artificial intelligence similar to those portrayed in movies – a computer system that works like a human brain, using information from its environment to make decisions free of human interaction.