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.