Uber acquires AI company and establishes Uber AI Labs

Uber has acquired Geometric Intelligence, a company specializing in artificial intelligence. Little is known about the company’s in-house technology, but it could learn certain tasks using half the amount of data that deep learning does.

Geometric Intelligence will initially form the core of the new Uber AI Labs in San Francisco, according to Uber. The department focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Uber does not disclose more, but Wired reports that the company is now two years old and has 15 employees. In between are professors from various American universities, such as New York University, Stanford and the University of Wyoming. In addition, one of the founders is a professor at Cambridge University.

According to conversations Wired has had with employees and people familiar with the company, Geometric Intelligence is targeting machine learning with limited data sets. That’s a relevant context for Uber, as self-driving cars need to know a lot in everyday life, but don’t necessarily get a lot of data. Already, the company is said to have made a lot of progress towards their goal of machine learning with limited data sets. “It’s a combination of rules-based learning, statistical learning and deep learning,” says Zoubin Gahramani, one of the founders.

Uber AI Labs is partnering with the Pittsburgh autonomous car division. Customers in that city can already take rides in self-driving Uber cars there, although the technology is clearly still in its infancy. The company seems to be trying to compete in this area with other large companies involved in AI, such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.