DeepMind’s first investors and buyers think their synthetic intelligence corporation would not have succeeded if it were not taken in by Google. Humayun Sheikh, the founding investor of DeepMind, who holds 43,750 of 3,386,754 stocks of the corporation in 2011, shared with CNBC that their London AI lab would have most likely failed if Google was not there to purchase $600 million worth of stocks in 2014.
It was reported that Facebook was initially enthusiastic and excited about buying DeepMind, but the corporate accredited and certified Google instead.
Humayun Sheikh shared that commercialization for AI-based companies is very difficult and tricky unless you are lucky enough to get absorbed by big corporations. Sheikh now runs his personal AI trading company called Fetch.ai.
“We chose Google as a partner because it was clear they were as passionate about AI as we were, and since then, our partnership has gone from strength-to-strength in pursuit of our shared long-term ambition for responsible and impactful AI.”
DeepMind spokesperson
Sheikh, who says he is a good friend of Demis Hassabis, the corporate’s CEO and co-founder, shared that there were issues about how DeepMind used to worry about earning money in the beginning. He shares that they spent almost five years holding meetings and discussing what to do with DeepMind.
The Google purchase allowed DeepMind access to plenty of computing power that Google has in its data center network. This permitted its AI models to train and learn things such as playing the abstract and strategic board game called Go. This acquisition also gave this start-up a free pass to Google’s engineering talent and a constant finance stream.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spends millions of dollars annually on DeepMind. In 2018, it lost $622 million. This number was up from $371 million in 2017 and $168 million in 2016.
Alphabet’s losses continuously increase because it kept hiring hundreds of top-notch researchers and data scientists to aid their corporation but have yet to generate positive results or any sizable revenue.
An industry insider who refused to be named shared and agreed that DeepMind would need a giant tech company to sustain its corporation indefinitely. He added, “the company is engaged in research, not products, and wouldn’t be able to obtain indefinite VC funding without eventually having a business model.” He also said that Google is a perfect fit.
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