<table><tr><th>From:</th><th>on behalf of Ben Goertzel</th></tr><tr><td>Sent:</td><td>Monday, January 27, 2014 5:08 AM</td></tr><tr><td>To:</td><td>Jeffrey Epstein</td></tr><tr><td>Subject:</td><td>Google buys Deep Mind ...</td></tr></table>

Wow, did you see this?

http://recode.net/2014/01/26/exclusive-google-to-buy-artificial-intelligence-startup-deepmind-for-400m/

That is the company I often pointed out as being the most likely competitor to OpenCog in really pushing toward AGI...

And I happen to know (from my friendship with their co-founder Shane Legg, who will now become a very wealthy Google employee) that Deep Mind has *nothing* technologically besides some interesting proto-AGI R&D code.... Nothing that works, really.

So it's pretty much an acqui-hire .... And 50 programmers for $400M is a really fat acquihire; $1M - $2M per programmer is way more typical... this shows that Google values anything Al or robotics ish quite a lot these days...

One read of the overall situation would be "Google is going to win the race to AGI" -- they have a lot of $5 and are looking to hire the entire Al and robotics field... Maybe they will change their name to CyberDyne systems (cf "Terminator" ...)

OTOH, more money doesn't •always• win; having the right set of ideas also means a lot.... Linux, not Windows, dominates supercomputing and

the Internet.... And they are not doing proto-AGI within Google X, they're doing it in their main product dev division, which brings a complicated set of compromises... Hmmm...

Interesting times !!!

more later...
ben

Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org

"In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane". -- Capt.
James T. Kirk
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