Share

Google buys machine learning startup

San Francisco - Google said on Wednesday that it has bought a Canadian startup specializing in getting machines to understand what people are trying to say.

The Internet titan did not disclose how much it paid for DNNresearch, which was founded last year by University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton and graduate students Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky.

The university said that Hinton is renowned for machine learning work with "profound implications" for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding.

"Together with two of my recent graduate students, I am betting on Google's team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs," Hinton said in a post at Google+ social network.

"That means we'll soon be joining Google to work with some of the smartest engineering minds to tackle some of the biggest challenges in computer science."

Google did not specify where it intends to focus the DNNresearch team but the company has a clear interest in tuning its search engine to a world in which people speak queries into smartphones or use snapped pictures as search terms.

For example, a machine would need to understand that a spoken search for "laptops running Windows" refers to devices powered by computers powered by Microsoft software and not odd a seemingly impossible physical activity.

Hinton said he will continue to teach part-time at the University of Toronto while working at California-based Google to "see what we can do with very large-scale computation."

Sutskever and Krizhevsky were to join the team at Google's campus in Silicon Valley.

We live in a world where facts and fiction get blurred
Who we choose to trust can have a profound impact on our lives. Join thousands of devoted South Africans who look to News24 to bring them news they can trust every day. As we celebrate 25 years, become a News24 subscriber as we strive to keep you informed, inspired and empowered.
Join News24 today
heading
description
username
Show Comments ()
Rand - Dollar
19.01
-0.4%
Rand - Pound
24.16
-0.2%
Rand - Euro
20.66
-0.3%
Rand - Aus dollar
12.39
+0.3%
Rand - Yen
0.13
+0.5%
Platinum
906.17
-1.9%
Palladium
1,006.16
0.0%
Gold
2,156.08
-0.2%
Silver
24.93
-0.5%
Brent Crude
86.89
+1.8%
Top 40
66,252
0.0%
All Share
72,431
0.0%
Resource 10
53,317
0.0%
Industrial 25
100,473
0.0%
Financial 15
16,622
0.0%
All JSE data delayed by at least 15 minutes Iress logo
Company Snapshot
Editorial feedback and complaints

Contact the public editor with feedback for our journalists, complaints, queries or suggestions about articles on News24.

LEARN MORE
Government tenders

Find public sector tender opportunities in South Africa here.

Government tenders
This portal provides access to information on all tenders made by all public sector organisations in all spheres of government.
Browse tenders