Facebook AI pro Throws Shade at DeepMind Headquarters
November 29, 2016
An AI expert at Facebook criticizes Google’s handling of DeepMind, we learn in Business Insider’s article, “Facebook’s AI Guru Thinks DeepMind is Too Far Away from the ‘Mothership’.” Might Yann LeCun, said guru, be biased? Nah. He simply points out that DeepMind’s London offices are geographically far away from Google’s headquarters in California. Writer Sam Shead, on the other hand, observes that physical distance does not hamper collaboration the way it did before this little thing called the Internet came along.
The article reminds us of rumors that Facebook was eying DeepMind before Google snapped it up. When asked, LeCun declined to confirm or deny that rumor. Shead tells us:
LeCun said: ‘You know, things played out the way they played out. There’s a lot of very good people at DeepMind.’ He added: ‘I think the nature of DeepMind eventually would have been quite a bit different from what it is now if DeepMind had been acquired by a different company than Google.
Google and Facebook are competitors in some areas of their businesses but the companies are also working together to advance the field of AI. ‘It’s very nice to have several companies that work on this space in an open fashion because we build on each other’s ideas,’ said LeCun. ‘So whenever we come up with an idea, very often DeepMind will build on top of it and do something that’s better and vice versa. Sometimes within days or months of each other we work on the same team. They hire half of my students.
Hooray for cooperation. As it happens, London is not an arbitrary location for DeepMind. The enterprise was founded in 2010 by two Oxbridge grads, Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, along with UCL professor Shane Legg. Google bought the company in 2014, and has been making the most of their acquisition ever since. For example, Shead reminds us, Google has used the AI to help boost the efficiency of their data-center cooling units by some 40%. A worthy endeavor, indeed.
Cynthia Murrell, November 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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