Comment by Juergen Schmidhuber:
Our former PhD student Shane Legg is co-founder of deepmind (with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman), just acquired by Google for ~$500m. Several additional ex-members of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA have joined deepmind, including Daan Wierstra, Tom Schaul, Alex Graves.
Yes, or in other words, these are the competent AGI researchers.
So I know we've already seen them buying a bunch of ML and robotics companies, but now they're purchasing Shane Legg's AGI startup. This is after they've acquired Boston Dynamics, several smaller robotics and ML firms, and started their own life-extension firm.
Is it just me, or are they trying to make Accelerando or something closely related actually happen? Given that they're buying up real experts and not just "AI is inevitable" prediction geeks (who shall remain politely unnamed out of respect for their real, original expertise in machine learning), has someone had a polite word with them about not killing all humans by sheer accident?