It’s worth taking the time to read through this whole piece. Gary’s take is a lot more nuanced than a lot of the comments/replies suggest. Still, for those who read better in tweets, I’ll pull out some of the key points and sprinkle in a bit of my own editorializing. Thread:https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1161690752524550144 …
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Actually, I’ll start with a bit of editorializing. :) While I agree with nearly every point that Gary makes in this piece, it’s somewhat deceiving to characterize the expenditures by DeepMind as “losses”.
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If DeepMind had been wrapped into Google AI instead of becoming a full Alphabet subsidiary, they wouldn’t even be reporting the specific expenditures associated with DeepMind. Many research initiatives at Google “lose” a lot of money. They just aren’t reported separately.
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Gary goes on to, more reasonably, describe DeepMind as one of the bigger research bets that Alphabet is making. The size of this bet may justify the separate reporting. But, in every world except for that of accounting, we’d call this a big, long-term investment, not a loss.
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Replying to @aricaroline
That's not true though -- it's reported separately due to UK law, not because of relative size. I'm a bit surprised this wasn't mentioned...
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thanks @Zergylord for the clarification for why the DM statement was broken out.
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