'Silicon Valley came after my people': Google AI CEO on why DeepMind sold to Google
Google AI CEO Demis Hassabis explains that DeepMind was sold to Google in 2014 primarily due to the massive capital requirements needed to compete with tech giants. He noted that the company lacked a commercial product and faced intense talent poaching from competitors.
Why it matters
It offers a rare, candid look at the financial pressures and talent wars that drive consolidation in the high-stakes artificial intelligence industry.
Demis Hassabis has given the plainest account yet of why he sold DeepMind to Google in 2014, and it has nothing to do with grand strategy. It was arithmetic. He reckoned that staying in the fight against the biggest technology companies in the world would take roughly $7 billion. At the time, he says, he was struggling to close rounds a fraction of that size. "The reason I sold was I knew it would require 7 billion dollars of investment," he said, adding that he "was barely able to scrape together 10 million dollar rounds at that point."The trigger, by his telling, was Atari. DeepMind's agents had learned to play classic arcade games from raw pixels alone, with nobody explaining the rules. It was a research result, not a product.
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