Facebook's AI guru thinks DeepMind is too far away from the 'mothership'

DeepMind, the AI research lab in London that was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million, faces one big problem, according to Professor Yann LeCun, who heads up Facebook's AI research group.

Notably, LeCun believes that DeepMind, which employs over 250 people and today sits under Alphabet (Google's parent company), is too far away from California.

"The challenge I think that DeepMind has is that it's geographically separated from the mothership in California and that makes it very difficult to build technology that can be used in products," LeCun told Business Insider during an interview in London last week. "So it pushes DeepMind to some extent to try to survive on its own."

DeepMind declined to comment on this story but it would likely argue that being based in the UK is not a barrier when it comes to working with product and research teams across Google and the rest of the Alphabet group.

While DeepMind's technology may not be prevalent in all of Google's products, the search giant announced in July that it had found one very important use for DeepMind's self-learning algorithms.

Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units - used to stop Google's self-built servers from overheating - by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system. That's going to be quite a large saving, given Google said it used 4,402,836 MWh of electricity in 2014, equivalent to the average yearly consumption of about 366,903 US family homes, according to Bloomberg.

LeCun said that DeepMind's forays into building healthcare applications are an example of how the company is operating relatively independently. He also said that DeepMind it putting a big emphasis on communication and public relations because "that's important for the group as a whole. Particularly if it's more difficult for them them to produce products."

Prior to Google's acquisition of DeepMind, there were rumours that Facebook was also interested in buying the startup, which was cofounded in 2010 by Oxbridge graduates Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, along with UCL academic professor Shane Legg.

When asked about the rumours and whether DeepMind would have been a good acquisition for Facebook, LeCun said: "You know, things played out the way they played out. There's a lot of very good people at DeepMind."

He added: "I think the nature of DeepMind eventually would have been quite a bit different from what it is now if DeepMind had been acquired by a different company than Google."

Google and Facebook are competitors in some areas of their businesses but the companies are also working together to advance the field of AI. "It's very nice to have several companies that work on this space in an open fashion because we build on each others ideas," said LeCun. "So whenever we come up with an idea, very often DeepMind will build on top of it and do something that's better and vice versa. Sometimes within days or months of each other we work on the same team. They hire half of my students."