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Comment by partingshots | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, not that DeepMind has to bring any return on investment anytime soon given how rich it’s Alphabet parent is and can easily continue to take out boatloads of money, but is there any foreseeable point of profitability for this company?

Or is this just more of a passion project from Sergey and/or Larry that they’re personally choosing to fund?

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Some Deepmind projects got integrated into Google projects in the past:

- WaveNet: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet - Data centre efficiency: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces-google...

But yes, these are probably very small fraction of their research projects. Since Google declared to be an AI-first company, this is probably still a good investment to keep them on the bleeding edge.

Looks like R & D only so far. But they are in proximity to City of London. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are both staffing up their AI Research divisions. They all compete in the same talent pool. So I would not be surprised to see some sort of partnership with a major bank in the coming year.

Regarding multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. If anyone has caught any of the League of Legends play recently streaming on Twitch leading up to the Finals. Particularly Faker and STK. DeepMind certainly has it's work cut out for them. Even 99.9% expert level human play won't be enough ;)

Well, Google recently announced they were using BERT, an AI model, to improve search results. The developers of BERT are from Google but apparently not part of DeepMind; however, DeepMind has also published some things on language modeling, so... there's that, at least.

This project doesn't seem that expensive to run and it resulted in a Nature paper. Seems like a favorable ROI already even for a for-profit company (given Google's size and possible benefits in PR and recruiting).

They have received worldwide news coverage for some of their work. Like Alpha Go. AI/ML aside, those achievements are huge in terms of marketing and PR.

Then, some R&D expenses can be tax deductible.

Just like... IBM?

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