The Google Brain project began in 2011 as a part-time research collaboration between Google fellow Jeff Dean, Google Researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng.[1] Ng had been interested in using deep learning techniques to crack the problem of artificial intelligence since 2006, and in 2011 began collaborating with Dean and Corrado to build a large-scale deep learning software system, DistBelief,[4] on top of Google's cloud computing infrastructure. Google Brain started as a Google X project and became so successful that it was graduated back to Google: Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X.[5]