Google is improving its AI technology with help from Oxford

Following Google’s acquisition of the secretive firm DeepMind, the tech giant has teamed up with Oxford University to research artificial intelligence. Revealed by Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and vice president of engineering at Google, the executive writes on the Google Europe Blog that the partnership will accelerate the firm’s understanding of artificial intelligence, specifically within the image recognition and natural language fields.

Google is assembling a team comprising some of the world’s most renowned artificial intelligence researchers to create… something? Back in January, Google bought A.I. company DeepMind for a reported $400 million, and no one really knew why. Now, it’s announcing a partnership with the Oxford University to further its research into image and language recognition. As part of the partnership, Google has acqui-hired two companies born from the renowned university. They are Dark Blue Labs, a startup focused on natural language understanding, and Vision Factory, which describes itself as offering “world-class, scientifically-proven object recognition and text recognition systems.” All seven founders of the two companies will be joining Google, which is hoping the move will accelerate efforts to improve speech and image recognition through “deep learning,” a type of artificial intelligence that mirrors biological neural networks.