The Google parent’s moonshot factory X this week officially unveiled Project Bellwether, its latest bid to apply technology to some of our biggest problems.
Here that means using AI tools to identify natural disasters like wildfire and flooding as quickly as possible.
“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” the Guard’s Col. Brian McGarry notes.
Google has been exploring the use of machine learning models and AI to predict natural disasters for some time now.
Project Bellwether’s partnership with the National Guard could well prove an important validation of that work.
If such a deal were to happen, the cost would likely be pretty substantial, involving some significant premium over the current value.
While Google/Alphabet has been extremely acquisitive over the years, the largest deal that it’s ever made was spending $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility in 2011.
More recently the largest deal involved spending $5.4 billion for security intelligence platform Mandiant in 2022.
Google usually stays under $3 billion, so a deal of this scope would be very much out of character for the company.
Another issue the company could face in trying to buy HubSpot is a hostile regulatory environment for large deals.
Sandbox AQ, the AI and quantum firm spun out of Google parent company Alphabet in 2022, has acquired Good Chemistry, a Vancouver-based quantum and computational chemistry startup, for an undisclosed sum.
Good Chemistry’s platform lets chemistry developers build chemical simulation apps and workflows using algorithms in quantum chemistry and machine learning as well as quantum computing.
“[Tapping] the broader Sandbox AQ reach and domain expertise will supercharge the capabilities of our platform.”As part of the acquisition, Sandbox AQ says that it’ll integrate Good Chemistry’s software, Qemist Cloud and Tangelo, into its enterprise software portfolio.
Qemist lets user take advantage of quantum chemistry through simulation, while Tangelo allows them to conduct chemistry experiments across quantum cloud providers and hardware devices.
Good Chemistry is Sandbox’s second acquisition.
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