Zuckerberg Gives DeepMind CEO Props For Google Deal

In 2013, Facebook was in deep talks to acquire the startup as the AI ​​race heated up, but those conversations fell through, The Information reported in 2014. A year later, Google acquired the company for more than 500 million dollars, according to report data.

Reports about the acquisition at the time did not make clear why talks with Facebook broke down.

But in a recent interview with South Park Commons, a tech community in San Francisco, Zuckerberg seemed to suggest that Hassabis used the company to get a better deal from Google.

“I wanted to buy DeepMind, but they went to Google,” he said. “Demis was good, by the way. He did a really good job of playing me off Google to get a good price, which I respect. Power to him. Power to him.”

Zuckerberg did not elaborate on this aspect. Spokesmen for Alphabet and Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since its acquisition by Google, DeepMind has focused on research to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is where computers will exhibit human reasoning.

Instead of acquiring DeepMind, Facebook launched its own lab with Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which Zuckerberg said in the South Park Commons interview helped provide an “open-source” approach to Meta’s work on AI.

When Meta released its Llama model last year, the company touted the technology as open source, which essentially means that developers, researchers, or companies can access the inside of the model to modify Llama for their own use cases. However, some critics have disputed Meta’s labeling and argued that Llama is not truly open source.