Current Google AI CEO Demis Hassabis is also the co-founder of DeepMind, and he gave an honest account of why he sold DeepMind to Google in 2014. According to a Times of India report, Hassabis said it was pure arithmetic rather than grand strategy.
He figured that it would take roughly $7 billion to keep up with the global tech giants. Unable to scrape through rounds of, in his words, “barely $10 million at the time”, he was left severely behind the required $7 billion investment.
According to him, the trigger that forced tech giants to take notice was DeepMind's agents learning how to play classic Atari arcade games without any explanation of the rules or instructions. This, described by Hassabis as a “research result”, was enough to make a small London lab famous in the AI industry at the time in Silicon Valley.
DeepMind, unlike other tech giants, was merely a lab without a product; it had no revenue and no business. Hassabis said that this was the case because the work was on core technology rather than anything sellable.
“They were coming after my people”
The salary gap also became an issue, with Hassabis saying that “they were coming after my people”, referring to tech giants attempting to poach his researchers from him. Hassabis said that he was “pocketing nothing” as researchers took home $100,000 while being offered up to $10 million by bigger companies.
Eventually, DeepMind was sold to Google in January 2014 for a price tag of $650 million, after talks with Facebook collapsed a year earlier. Three years of negotiations codenamed “Project Mario” followed as Hassabis and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman pushed for a semi-independent DeepMind with a nine-member oversight board, according to Sebastian Mallaby's book on Hassabis.
Hassabis eventually stopped pushing as Sundar Pichai refused to let AI leave Google's core and Reid Hoffman offered $1 billion to back a walkout.
Back at the helm
Hassabis is now back at the head of the company, now known as “Google DeepMind”, with its product Gemini processing more than 10 billion tokens a minute. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has marked $175-185 billion for expenditure in AI infrastructure, which is roughly 25 times the $7 billion that Hassabis was struggling to raise in 2014 before the sale to Google.
