The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy

March 19, 2021

(Wired) – That fall—before lying down in the back of the bus from Toronto to New York, taking the train 2,700 miles to Truckee, California, at the crest of the Sierra Nevadas, and then stretching across the back seat of a taxi for the hour-long drive to South Lake Tahoe—Hinton had created a new company. It included only two other people, both young graduate students in his lab at the university. It made no products. It had no plans to make a product. And its website offered nothing but a name, DNN-research, which was even less inviting than the sparse page. The 64-year-?old Hinton—who seemed so at home in academia, with his tousled gray hair, wool sweaters, and two-steps-ahead?of?you sense of humor—wasn’t even sure he wanted to start a company until his two students talked him into it. But as he arrived in South Lake Tahoe, some of the biggest tech companies in the world were gearing up for a contest to acquire his newborn startup.