India's Halli Labs joins Google's Next Billion Users team
M&A (mergers and acquisitions) is the flavor of the season, it appears.The latest one was Google acquiring Bengaluru-based Halli Labs, a relatively new start-up which made its presence known on May 22 this year. Halli Labs is focused on addressing, what it describes as, "old problems" via deep learning and machine learning solutions. Here's all you need to know.
All under one roof
Halli means village in Kannada dialect, a language spoken by the people of Karnataka. They announced that their firm will be part of Google's Next Billion Users team. The goal is "to help get more technology and information into more people's hands around the world." The news was shared by them on Medium and Caesar Sengupta, a product management VP at Google confirmed it.
Next Billion Users project
Google told TechCrunch, Halli labs will join their team which is concentrating on making products for the "next billion users coming online, particularly in India." Although it's not clear if Halli Labs was funded or not and what is its employee strength. Its founder Pankaj Gupta's career history includes being CTO at now-defunct Stayzilla, running recommendation and personalization at Twitter and other entrepreneurial endeavors.
A change in direction
Recently all tech giants are upping their AI efforts, transitioning from hardware to software, pure research to practical applications. Google consolidated firms like DeepMind and is now investing heavily in educational programs to get fresh talent. Meanwhile, its parent firm Alphabet is letting go of assets like Boston Dynamics unit, denoting shift of focus towards AI-based applications around software from AI-based hardware.
A search for fresh talent
Several tech start-ups are making important advances in fields of deep learning, neural networks, computer vision, robotics, and others. While some maintain a separate identity, others are being brought together by tech giants. Baidu, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Snap are some of the tech firms, leading the AI race and they're not shy of spending moolah or walking the extra mile for it.
