Pierre Sarrau, chief investment officer of multi-asset strategies at BlackRock, says the company is talking to a UK-based Google company, adding that it is a “very exciting joint venture”. It is unclear which Google company that might be, but the internet giant last year acquired London-based DeepMind Technologies, which specialises in artificial intelligence — an area of particular interest to BlackRock. DeepMind, founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, aims to combine “the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms”. Machine learning tries to create algorithms that predict future events using current data.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f5f7dda8-734f-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162cc.html#axzz3pQHEuKzh