Gary Marcus

First thought: Why frame this as "DeepMind lost $572 million" rather than "Google made a very large, long-term investment in one of its research arms, DeepMind"? /2

DeepMind's mission is to "solve intelligence" -- a statement I find nonsensical BTW -- but whatever you want to call it, AI is a very hard, long-term research problem and it's great for companies to fund basic, long-term research that doesn't have immediate payoff. /3

Second thought: Marcus claims that deep reinforcement learning is "a kind of turbocharged memorization". That's an interesting but still too vague hypothesis that I think needs to be made more formal and testable. /4

Third thought: Marcus: "DeepMind has yet to find any large-scale commercial application of deep reinforcement learning." Why the focus on this kind of short-term commercial application? Was that kind of short-term payoff what Google had in mind when it acquired Deep Mind? /5