How A Breakout Clip On One Private Jet Flight Lit The Fuse — Google Bought DeepMind, Musk Built OpenAI – View from the Wing

The plan for the U.K. leaving the E.U. was hatched at the Chicago O’Hare Pizzaria Uno. Jon Ostrower is known for the saying that “there’s an aviation angle to everything.” And so it is with AI, too. The modern revolution in AI, and the corporate divisions, stem from a single private jet flight in 2013.

Elon Musk and PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek were traveling with Google co-founder Larry Page.

Everyone was starting at an update from Demis Hassabis of DeepMind about a reinforcement-learning breakthrough, where an agent learned Atari Breakout and discovered the “tunnel” strategy (getting the ball behind the bricks so it ricochets up top and clears fast).

Page saw the clip, heard the explanation and wanted to know what is this company? DeepMind stopped being a niche “interesting London lab” and became a must-own asset for Google. That flight was the attention catalyst, trigger a…