The Race For AI: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple In A Rush To Grab Artificial Intelligence Startups

More than 20 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired in the last 3 years by corporate giants competing in the space, including Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook, Intel, and, more recently, Salesforce. There have been 4 major acquisitions already in 2016. Google has been the most prominent global player, with 5 key acquisitions under its belt (follow all of Google's M&A activity here, through our real-time Google acquisitions tracker). In 2013, the corporate giant picked up deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto. This acquisition reportedly helped Google make major upgrades to its image search feature.