Google acquires DNNresearch

Background

In 2012, Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, incorporated DNNresearch Inc., a start-up from the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science^[1]. According to the university, the two students had developed a system that dramatically improved the state of the art in object recognition^[1] — the task of getting a computer to say what an image contains. Their work belonged to a line of research on deep neural networks: models built from many stacked layers of simple computing units, whose connection strengths are adjusted during training so that the network learns useful representations of its input.

Before the acquisition was announced, Google had awarded Hinton's research group a $600,000 gift to support further work on neural networks^[1].

The announcement

On Tuesday, 12 March 2013, the University of Toronto announced that Google had acquired DNNresearch^[1][2]. The university said Google acquired the company for its research on deep neural networks^[1]. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed^[1]. The news was also carried by the technology outlet iThome^[2].

Where the people went

The university said Krizhevsky and Sutskever, who would both move to Google, had developed the object recognition system^[1]. Hinton would divide his time between his university research and his work at Google, spending time at Google's Toronto office and several months a year at its Mountain View headquarters^[1]. Hinton said he was excited to keep his research in Toronto while helping Google apply new developments in deep learning^[1].

The university also said the deal would support Hinton's graduate students in the department's machine learning group while protecting their research autonomy^[1].

What was distinctive about the deal

Several concrete arrangements stand out. The company being bought had been incorporated only a year earlier, and it came out of a university department rather than an industrial laboratory; its two co-founders were graduate students, and both of them moved to Google after the acquisition^[1]. The senior figure did not leave the university: Hinton kept his research there and worked at Google part of the time, in two different offices^[1].

The university presented the purchase together with guarantees for the students who stayed behind, describing support for the machine learning group and protection of its research autonomy as part of the arrangement^[1]. It also came shortly after a $600,000 gift from Google to the same research group^[1].

Object recognition and deep learning were the stated reasons for the purchase: the university said Google bought the company for its research on deep neural networks, and that the students' system had dramatically improved the state of the art in recognizing objects^[1]. What the deal did not include, at least publicly, was a price — the financial terms were not disclosed^[1].