Google Pumps Cash into DeepMind: A Cost Black Hole Contains Sour Grapes
August 8, 2019
DarkCyber believes that some of the major London newspapers are not wearing happy face buttons when talking about Google. The reasons boil down to money. Google has it in truckloads courtesy of advertising. London newspapers don’t because advertisers love print less these days.
I read “DeepMind Losses Mount as Google Spends Heavily to Win AI Arms Race.” The write up is a good example of bad decisions the now ageing whiz kids are making. Sour grapes? More like sour grapes journalism.
Straight away smart software is going to migrate through many human performed activities. Getting software to work, not send deliveries to the wrong house, pick out the exact person of interest from a sea of faces, and make decisions which are slightly more reliable than the LIBOR folks delivered — this is the future.
The future is expensive unless one gets really lucky. Right, that’s like the “I’m feeling lucky” thing Google provides courtesy of advertisers’ spending.
Back to the bitter vintage write up: The London newspaper states:
Its annual accounts from Companies House show losses of more than £470m in 2018, up from £302m the year before, and its expenses rose from £334m to £568m. Of the £1.03bn due for repayment this year, £883m is owed to parent company Alphabet.
Okay, investments (losses). This is not news. What is news is the tiny hint that there may be some value in looking at the repayments issue? Well, why not look into the tax implications of such inside debts?
Another non news factoid: It costs money to hire people who can make AI work. What about the future of AI if a company does not have smart people? There are some case examples about this type of misstep in non Googley businesses. What are the differences? Similarities? How about a smidgen of research and analysis.
Recycling numbers without context is — to be frank — like a commercial database summarizing an article from a linguistics journal published a year ago. Great for some, but for most, nothing substantive or useful.
Poor Google. The company is investing in a city and country which has the distinction of newspapers which grouse incessantly about a company that’s been around 20 or so years.
Will Google deploy its technology to report the news? Perhaps that would make an interesting write up. Recycling public financial data with a couple of ounces of lousy whine is not satisfying to those in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 2019
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