[the_gigi]

Google hired recently Ray Kurzweil as director of engineering. Ray's recent book - "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" - is influenced heavily by the ideas from the first generation of Numenta's technology (via Dileep George). So, you could say that Google is following Numenta to some degree. Jeff Hawkins is always careful about setting expecetations and tries avoid as much hype as possible. The progress was indeed slower than what some people imagined it to be, but it is a very hard problem . Now, Numenta has Grok and its technology will be tested in the field. It also released NuPIC as open source, which will let anyone interested to dive in, run benchmarks, etc.

[Killah911]

In all honestly though, the Google founders were Ray Kurzweil fans before he wrote the "How to create a mind" (which is book that's a whole another discussion altogether). I would be really surprised if there weren't already some interest and some back and forth between Numeta and others in the AI field. It's really about goals, and if goals align then "acquisitions" might make sense. But it is far from a marker of success. There are plenty of acu-hires to prove that.

[Sven7]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4 - Jeff Hawkins recent talk at Google with Kurzweil in the audience asking questions.