[ML News] DeepMind fails to get independence from Google

hello everyone today we're going to look at some news in the machine learning world the wall street journal here writes google unit deepmind tried and failed to win ai autonomy from parent so

apparently deepmind has sought to become more independent of google in the past and here they write that it's been founded in 2010 and bought by google in 2014 and starting in 2015 there were already talks as far as we want to be more independent now apparently deepmind told staff late last month that google has called off those talks here it says deepmind's founders had sought among other ideas a legal structure used by non-profit groups reasoning that the powerful artificial intelligence they were researching shouldn't be controlled by a single corporate entity on the other hand from google's point of view the proposed structure didn't make financial sense for alphabet given its total investment in the unit and its willingness to bankroll deepmind so deepmind sold itself to google because of money needs their research consumes ginormous quantities of energy and of researchers and that costs a lot of money so they cashed in 500 billion as a price said it bought the startup for 500 million and the losses of the company were about 660 million dollars this company makes giant losses because what they do is essentially pr so the position of google here is that they want to bring the teams closer together and have a stronger impact rather than separating the teams this is an asset to google a tech asset

so for deepmind it's pretty easy to push for a non-profit structure given that you know they will never make profit ever and their claims to wanting to be open and not in the hands of a single thing i could take it more seriously if they were ever to publish in open access journals which they don't they publish in nature oh you gotta pay 20 bucks for that article thanks deepmind surely you don't want the technology to fall into the hands of a select few if they were to actually open source their code and not just some crappy pseudo code that has lots of mistakes in it i'm sure you want to just distribute that stuff out of there because if it's just in the hand of a single minority that would be terrible right no i think what they want is they recognize they got something good going there they got someone paying for their bills and they don't want someone from top down telling them hey make it more into a product hey give it to us we need it to make money what are you talking about google wants this technology in their products as fast as possible as best as possible and deep mind researchers are just really smart people that output these things lastly i want to show you this rendering of the proposed new deep mind offices in here like if that is not the most dystopian future picture i've ever seen i mean it does look cool but it is a bit on the elitist side i would feel it's a cool office like sure i take it absolutely great what i'm saying is you want this on one hand but then also you want giant loss making and independence on the other hand maybe that's not possible at the same time i'm just not really sure that is the reason deep mind seeks independence all right that was it for me this is already too long tell me what you think in the comments what your deep mind do what you google do who's the good guy who's the bad guy how should ai benefit all of humanity or are we all doomed peace out you