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Google has confirmed the acquisition of DeepMind, a British company that deals with artificial intelligence and is headquartered in London. The price that Google will spend for the last of a series of acquisitions in the last year hasn’t been confirmed but according to various sources is between $400 and $500 million.

A curious fact is that there are not a lot of information about DeepMind, also because the company’s web site is a single page. It was founded in 2012 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman and the first one is the one we know the most about. Born in 1976, Hassabis was a child prodigy in chess and as an adult worked in the field of videogame design and is a neuroscientist. Combining these two fields, there’s definitely the expertise to work on the development of artificial intelligence.

DeepMind has developed various approaches to artificial intelligence with a team that is rumored to have exceeded 50 people. Evidently they’re developing something good because according to some sources Facebook was also interested in acquiring the company. Eventually Google made it but why did it spend so much money for this acquisition?

At the end of 2012 a collaboration was announced between Google and the renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil. We’re talking about a person who not only continually tries to predict the future of technology but also helps to create it in the first person because he’s been working with computers since the ’60s. It’s clear that putting together such a person with a team of other brilliant people can create a remarkable synergy.

An artificial intelligence can also be useful at home, for example to enhance equipment such as those developed by Nest Labs, one of the recent acquisitions of Google. It can be even more useful for improving the skills of a robot such as the ones produced by Boston Dynamics, another company bought by Google a few weeks ago.

Google is spending billions of dollars to acquire companies that deal in one way or another with highly advanced technologies. The pattern is clear, we just need to understand what the company’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are planning exactly, especially in the long term.