Is the deep spirit of Alphabet in a difficult situation?



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DeepMind, the subsidiary centered on Al-Alphabet, bleeds money: last year, it lost $ 571 million, according to the Financial Times. If that were not enough, he owes his parent company about $ 1.4 billion (although there seems to be no risk of real default).

What lies behind this intense burn? In 2018, Deepmind
paid salaries of $ 485 million
against $ 242 million in 2017 and $ 127 million
million euros in 2016. LinkedIn indicates that the company employs 838 people, which represents a break
up to $ 581,000 per head. And that's before considering the budget devoted to
equipment, services and everything that goes into advanced artificial manufacturing
intelligence and research in machine learning.

In return, DeepMind generated approximately $ 125 million in
revenues, all from Alphabet sales. A.I. from DeepMind products end up
integrated with YouTube, advertising activities and Google's cloud, Waymo
autonomous driving platform
etc. He also spent a lot of time
publish his work with in-depth learning, especially in the context of play;
its A.I. agents have become very good at beating humans in games such as "Go"
DOTA 2 "and" Quake III ", but that's not the kind of thing that translates into
huge profit.

"DeepMind has been mostly focused on simulations and games where you can get quick success and a lot of attention. There is really a pressure on them for them to deliver to Google, "said Pedro Domingos, an A.I. scientist who wrote" The Master Algorithm, "said FT.

If fiscal tightening is not enough, there are new
rumblings of internal problems. DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has recently been
put on leave for undisclosed reasons, according to
at Bloomberg
. Suleyman not only oversees the applied division of DeepMind, but
but he is also considered an AI ambassador, explaining his potential (and
ethics) to the public and government officials.

Under normal circumstances, substantial cash
departure of a high-level leader would be enough to stir up rumors of
imminent stop. This will probably not happen, but DeepMind is still in a
strange place; as a subsidiary, it is supposed to provide assets related to A.I.
Alphabet and its products, but Google Brain, Google's internal site
A.I. Store, already occupies a similar role in the Alphabet ecosystem. Or
Does Google seem inclined to allow DeepMind to market its products to others?
businesses, which could potentially solve some of the revenue concerns; for the
moment, the subsidiary is well shut up in its silo.

If more senior executives and researchers leave DeepMind,
we can then assume that the problems of the subsidiary are only deepening – in particular
if they migrate to a rival, I.I. shop such
as OpenAI
. In the current state of things, it seems that DeepMind is at a very strange moment:
burn tons of money, making some breakthroughs in deep research but not
live up to its huge early advertising hype.

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