What Is MetaMind? Salesforce's Latest Acquisition

salesforce.com, inc. CRM acquired on Monday MetaMind, an artificial intelligence startup. MetaMind describes itself a "growing startup working with state-of-the-art AI techniques." The company is based in Palo Alto and lists Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff as both an advisor and investor. According to Tech Crunch, MetaMind's "general-purpose platform was designed to predict outcomes for language, vision and database tasks." The popular technology focused blog added that MetaMind's technology "could reportedly answer everything from specific queries about snippets of text to the sentiment of that text." Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor, was quoted by Wired as saying MetaMind's architecture is "interesting in that it is aiming at something potentially very ambitious, trying to sequentially parse a large amount of facts . . . in such a way, via a learned semantic representation, that one can answer questions about them." In a public letter to stakeholders confirming the Salesforce acquisition, MetaMind's CEO Richard Socher said that his company's technology, coupled with Salesforce's platform, will "offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes." Socher added that the acquisition will also "extend Salesforce's data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform."