Neuron Makers · Part I · Prologue

The Auction

December 2012, a borrowed room in a Lake Tahoe casino hotel. A company three weeks old with three employees and no product. Hinton ran a sealed email auction; four of the most powerful firms in computing bid the price up the ladder until he stopped it at $44 million and chose Google. This was the moment Big Tech realized it had to buy in.

Four bidders

Google Deep pockets, a research arm already taking neural nets seriously. WON · $44M

Microsoft In the bidding from the start.

Baidu China's search giant, via researcher Kai Yu, who saw it coming.

DeepMind Hassabis's London lab — believed most, could least afford to win.

The asset

DNNresearch

Three people, no product, no revenue:
Geoffrey Hinton · Alex Krizhevsky · Ilya Sutskever

SOURCE · NEURON MAKERS, PROLOGUE (The Man Who Didn't Sit Down) · Stated in text: the bid passed $20M, then $30M, and stopped at $44M (widely cited). Intermediate rungs ($25M, $35M, $40M) are interpolated steps shown for legibility, not figures from the chapter.