“Uber Pioneers New Frontier with AI Lab Launch Following Geometric Intelligence Acquisition”

Ride-hailing giant, Uber, recently acquired Geometric Intelligence, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup known for its cutting-edge research. This acquisition has simultaneously paved the way for the launch of a brand new research wing titled Uber AI Labs. Recognizing the talent within the startup, Uber has elected to absorb all 15 of Geometric Intelligence’s employees, further enhancing the development capabilities of the new AI Lab.

Uber AI Labs will now primarily focus on advancing the company’s autonomous vehicles operation. In addition, the lab will set its sights on the optimization of other key areas such as food delivery facilitation through the UberEATS service.

Geometric Intelligence, established in October 2014, was founded by an esteemed group of academia including New York University’s cognitive scientist, Gary Marcus, machine learning professor from the University of Cambridge, Zoubin Ghahramani, computer science professor at the University of Central Florida, Kenneth Stanley, and Douglas Bemis, an NYU alumnus with a PhD in neurolinguistics.

The aforementioned team will now put their knowledge and skills to use at Uber AI Labs. Gary Marcus will take over leadership of the new lab in his dual role as an Uber director. This means the new team, likely based in San Francisco, California, may have to relinquish their active roles at their respective institutions, marking the start of a new chapter in their professional lives.

Geometric Intelligence isn’t just any AI startup. The company is renowned for its groundbreaking solutions to the ‘sparse data’ problem. This problem pertains to how an AI system can identify objects or situations with minimum input data. This contrasts with the more data-intensive systems prevalent today. Jeff Holden, the Chief Products Officer at Uber, recognizes that there’s much to learn when it comes to the multitude of possible road scenarios for self-driving cars.

Gary Marcus, in an MIT Technology Review article, spoke about the uniqueness of Geometric Intelligence’s approach to deep learning. He expressed his interest in marrying new areas of AI, like deep learning (a form of machine learning that has proved particularly effective in recent years), alongside older AI traditions that involve machines obeying explicit rules.

With this new initiative, Uber aims to achieve better precision results with its AI systems, not unlike what Google is accomplishing with DeepMind and Microsoft’s strides in speech recognition technology.

Even before this latest start-up acquisition, Uber has shown its commitment to autonomous vehicles by purchasing Otto, a self-driving truck startup, in August for $700m. By October, one of the trucks had successfully completed a beer run from Fort Collins, Colo., to Colorado Springs – a roughly 120-mile trip on Interstate 25.

Judging by these strategic acquisitions and initiatives, it’s clear that Uber is gearing up to being at the forefront of AI research and development in the transportation industry.