Google has been on a massive buying spree lately, snapping up key hires such as Ray Kurzweil, who is considered by many to be the godfather of commercial cognitive computing.

Companies like Google, IBM and Microsoft have been building out machine-learning teams that can leverage their investments in vast networks of computers.

The amount of transistors needed to match the number of neurons in a human brain is a tremendous 100 billion, and it will take us until around 2025 to replicate on a computer chip, according to Kurzweil, although this might be aggressive due to the physics around increasingly smaller transistors in microchips. […]