This is how much Google is spending on cutting edge AI research

Google acquired the British artificial-intelligence startup DeepMind in 2014 for a reported £400 million (roughly $525 million), a company its cofounder Demis Hassabis once described as aiming at "solving intelligence, and then using that to solve everything else." Since then, the company's researchers have built a system that beat humans at one of the most complicated board games ever, and is now trying to beat humans at complex video games. It's building AI that's learning to navigate 3D spaces as we do, and is training other systems on British medical data, theoretically to spot illness more quickly. It's also started to integrate with teams in the US to bring its work to Google products where they might be useful. All of this research comes at a price.