Intent On Winning Arms Race, Alphabet Inc Continues To Gobble Up A.I. Specialists

With a total of eleven acquisitions in the past four years alone, Google parent Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is clearly the most aggressive company in terms of buying up artificial intelligence (AI) firms. That's according to market researchers are CB Insights, who recently published a study recapping all the major acquisitions in the space since 2012: In 2013, Google 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. In 2014 Google acquired British company DeepMind Technologies for some $600M (Google's DeepMind program recently beat a human world champion in the board game "Go"). Last year, it acquired visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai.