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Google buys DeepMind

Google pays around £400 million for a three-year-old London research company with no products; frontier AI research becomes a thing the largest companies own.

category
culture
significance
2 of 5
people
Demis Hassabis, Larry Page
organisations
Google, DeepMind

what had to happen · 31 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 9

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1958The perceptron learns
  5. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  6. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  7. 1965Moore's law
  8. 1969Perceptrons
  9. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 7

  1. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  2. 1999The first GPU
  3. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  4. 2007CUDA
  5. 2009ImageNet
  6. 2010Rectified linear units
  7. 2010DeepMind is foundeddirect

IV · Deep learning · 3

  1. 2012Dropout
  2. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  3. 2013Deep Q-networks play Ataridirect

On 26 January 2014 Google agreed to buy DeepMind for a sum reported at about £400 million, or around $650 million, its largest European acquisition. DeepMind had roughly seventy-five employees, no revenue and one published result, the Atari-playing network of a month earlier. Facebook had tried to buy it first. The deal included, at Demis Hassabis's insistence, an ethics board and a promise that the technology would not be used for military purposes.

The price was a signal. Google had already bought Geoffrey Hinton's company and hired Andrew Ng, and its rivals responded: Facebook founded FAIR under Yann LeCun in December 2013, Baidu hired Ng in 2014, and the talent market for deep-learning researchers, which had been a few dozen people, became a bidding war. The frontier of the field, which had been in universities, moved into a handful of companies with the compute and the salaries to hold it.

Elon Musk, an early DeepMind investor, later said the sale was what convinced him that a counterweight was needed, and in December 2015 he helped found OpenAI to be one.

what it led to · 11 events downstream, through 2026

Built on it directly:

  1. 2015OpenAI is foundedIV

And, through them, by era:

V · Transformers · 1
  1. 2021Anthropic is founded
VI · Everyone · 5
  1. 2023Claude
  2. 2023OpenAI fires and rehires its chief executive
  3. 2024Claude 3 catches GPT-4
  4. 2024Claude learns to use a computer
  5. 2024The Model Context Protocol
VII · Agents · 4
  1. 2025Claude 4 and Claude Code
  2. 2025MCP is donated to the Agentic AI Foundation
  3. 2026Claude Fable 5 and the Mythos class
  4. 2026Claude Fable 5.1

sources · 1

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