Online transportation company Uber has acquired startup Geometric Intelligence. However, the financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
Uber will be integrating Geometric Intelligence into the company's A.I. Labs division. Uber acquired the mysterious startup firm, along with all of its employees who will be transferred into its A.I Labs division.
Uber's A.I. Labs division will serve as the company's in-house research and development arm and will focus on artificial intelligence. The goal of the new division's is to develop technologies that can be applied in autonomous cars, as well as contribute to machine learning technologies.
Geometric Intelligence founders Gary Marcus and Zoubin Ghahramani will be the co-directors of Uber's A.I. Labs. All 15 staffs employed by Geometric Intelligence will be absorbed by Uber as well.
In a statement acquired by The New York Times, Marcus said, "Every major company realizes how essential A.I. is to what they're doing. Because of the scale of data people are operating on, even the smallest gains in efficiency can turn out enormous changes at these companies, especially in terms of profit."
With the recent deal with Uber, Marcus hopes that his team can take advantage of Uber's massive resources to develop new artificial intelligence technologies. Marcus added that Uber's massive repository of data collected from millions of daily users could help A.I. Labs to develop self-driving vehicles.
Tech giants like Facebook and Google have developed a method called Deep Learning where computers are provided with a vast amount of data sets to model its algorithms into exactly how the human brain works.
Uber is not the only car company that has set its eyes on artificial intelligence. According to CNet, Honda has already established an A.I. research lab in Tokyo. The company plans to preview some of its breakthrough developments at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017 in January.