[industry] Google, Intel, Apple and other giant artificial intelligence acquisition overview

Since 2011, close to 140 private companies that do artificial intelligence technology have been acquired, of which only 2016 acquisitions reached 40 (as of October 7, 2016). Large companies like Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple and Softbank are competing to acquire private artificial intelligence companies. This month, Samsung acquired startup company VivLabs and joined the competition. Samsung completed the acquisition and plans to develop an artificial intelligence assistant like Siri.

In this acquisition, Google has been the most prominent player. Since 2011, it has acquired 11 artificial intelligence startups.

In 2013, Google chose DNNresearch, a deep learning and neural network startup under the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. According to reports, this acquisition helped Google make a major upgrade to its future image search capabilities. In 2014, Google spent $600 million to acquire DeepMind Technologies in the UK. This year, it also acquired the visual search startup Moodstock, as well as the bot platform Api.ai.

Intel and Apple follow closely. The former only acquired three start-up companies this year: Itseez, Nervana Systems and Movidius, and Apple recently acquired Turi and Tuplejump.

Twitter ranks third with four major acquisitions. One recently acquired startup is Magic Pony.

Softbank acquired TempoAI last year to join the competition, and this year it has acquired two start-up companies: MetaMind from KhoslaVentures and the Open Source Machine Learning Server, PredictionIO.