Google is improving its AI technology with help from Oxford

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.