17 hours ago Jan. 29, 2014 - 10:30 AM PST

Artificial intelligence might be the most misunderstood term in technology. It conjures up images of malevolent robots and self-aware computer systems capable of outwitting or at least matching wits with human beings. It is not that. At least not today.

Googles acquisition of artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for $400 million sent the tech world atwitter earlier this week. Everybody wanted to know what the mysterious company was up to and why Google was willing to pay so much for it. After a day or so of mystery and even speculation that Google wanted to turn its new robots into sentient beings, the probable truth finally began to emerge.

Google just wants to build a better search platform, and talent isnt going to come cheap with everybody in the web vying for it.

DeepMind was working on some form of artificial intelligence technology, although the details are still somewhat murky. It had filed patent applications around image search, and the Re/Code post linked to above quotes AI expert Yoshua Bengio, who described a DeepMind paper about teaching a computer to learn the rules of Atari games as essentially using deep learning. Heres a primer (albeit one in need of an update) we did on deep learning in November.

Whether or not its methods or its people are worth $400 million is up for debate, but one thing is not: DeepMind was just the latest in a string of similar acquisitions of artificial intelligence talent and technology by large web companies. And it wont be the last.

We recapped the recent activity earlier this month when Pinterest bought a computer vision startup called Visual Graph, but heres an abbreviated version of moves that happened throughout 2012 and 2013: Dropbox bought Anchovi Labs; Google bought DNNresearch (and its co-founder Geoffrey Hinton); Yahoo bought LookFlow, IQ Engines and SkyPhrase; Facebook hired Yann LeCun to head up its new AI lab. Various students of Hinton and LeCun (who are also professors), as well as of their peers from other top universities, are floating around companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

How SkyPhrases technology interpreted my query.

A betting man might wager that a Silicon Valley startup called Vicarious is one of the next up for acquisition. It launched in August 2012 with $15 million in venture capital and in October 2013 claimed it has passed the Turing test by successfully cracking CAPTCHAs at up to a 90 percent rate. Vicarious is clear to point out that it doesnt do deep learning (nor do some of the other startups mentioned), but its trying to accomplish a similar task. If someone is interested in buying it, the acquisition price might depend on who else is making offers.

Which, actually, brings up one other thing thats not up for debate: deep learning, artificial intelligence and similar technologies are not what we instinctively want to think they are. Largely, the companies and researchers being acquired by Google, Facebook et al are focusing on two things: computer vision (usually object recognition) and natural language processing. Their algorithms try to learn the features of objects and the meanings of words and phrases so computers can automate tasks such as classification.

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Google isn’t the only company working on artificial intelligence. It’s just the richest