Google buys Artificial Intelligence company. Our cyber overlords gain power.

Google is our forthcoming Cyber Over-Lords. Eradicating privacy, buying robot armies, challenging death, and now harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence. It’s game over man, but who knows. Maybe they’ll give us cookies and milk and pat us on the head.

Clearly not content with buying a terrifying robot army, Google is now purchasing a London-based artificial intelligence company to go with it—for a cool $500 million.

The Information reports that Google will buy DeepMind for “more than $500 million,” having beaten Facebook in negotiations with the startup at the end of last year. According to Re/code, the acquisition was led by Larry Page, and it will add to a burgeoning AI team at Google—not least Ray Kurzweil, who was hired in 2012 to work on machine learning and language processing.

Itself focussed on deep learning, DeepMind was founded by neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, , Skype developer Jaan Tallin, and researcher Shane Legg. It is, however, very much a start-up: its website is currently just a landing page and, despite having 75 employees, it’s vague about exactly what it’s working to achieve beyond using”the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.”

Alongside the acquisition, Google announced that it was also establishing an ethics board to ensure the potentially controversial AI technology can’t be abused. Speaking of which, it remains unclear exactly what Google plans to do with DeepMind now that it has it, and how its staff will integrate into the search company’s structure. What does seem likely, though, is that the results will be impressive.

[Gizmodo]