The Latest in IT Security

Google has confirmed that it will acquire artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepMind, a London-based company the tech giant scooped up for an estimated minimum of $500 million. According to Re/code, which broke the story yesterday and reported the ticket price at $400 million, the purchase is in large part an artificial intelligence talent acquisition. The company was founded by former child chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, developer Jaan Tallin, and artificial intelligence researcher Shane Legg. DeepMind joins an already-long list of robotics and AI companies recently purchased by Google, including Boston Dynamics (which builds award-winning, transformer-like robots), Flutter (which specializes in gesture recognition) and, most recently, Nest (which builds smart household items like thermostats and smoke detectors). Googles DeepMind acquisition also led it to establish, upon the smaller companys insistence, a DeepMind-Google ethics board that will set standards for use of the AI technology.