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I don't know anyone on the team, but Om Malik was not impressed and he's usually reliable:

https://twitter.com/om/status/427653907766972416

> A $400 million talent acquisition with little talent. That's how Google rolls now!

There's also word that it was more than $400m, perhaps as high as $500m. That's a lot for talent any way you slice it.

How is he qualified to judge ML talent? DeepMind wasn't just a 3 man team, Yann Lecun posted on G+ that 3 of his PhD students were on the team and I've heard that they were recruiting more people.

Exactly. Interesting, Yann LeCun in his G+ post (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/LnKBPi9cCWm) explicitly mentioned that the acquired ML scientists have been focused in reinforcement learning. Also, they have published ArXiv paper on the subject: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf.

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