As DeepMind's founder leaves, is Britain's brightest AI lab really free from Google's control?

When the promising British artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014 for a reported £400m, the deal came with strict conditions meant to ease fears that its world-leading technology would be exploited by the US tech giant. The company would set up an independent ethics board to preside over its development of "artificial general intelligence", a system that mimics the way humans think. None of DeepMind's health data would be associated with Google accounts or services. And its leaders and headquarters would remain in London, where the company was founded. Critics say that those pledges have been eroded since then.