The co-founder was overhead?
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “New Witness” (ID: AI_era), edit Da Ming, Xiao Qin, Zhang Jia.
According to foreign media reports, Google’s DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman was “vacated”. Suleiman’s medical project has been controversial for a long time. DeepMind’s loss-making profits have been in the foreseeable future. Is Suleiman’s “vacation” a personal will or an unspeakable secret?
Only, according to several foreign media reports, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s AI company DeepMind, is currently on vacation, and a company spokesperson confirmed the news.
“After ten years of busy, he now took some time off.” The company said that his vacation was a joint decision of the company and Suleiman himself, and said the company expects he will return before the end of the year.
Among the many foreign media, Bloomberg first reported the news of Suleiman’s vacation, which talked about the controversy caused by some of the projects he led.
Mustafa Suleyman
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, when it took four years to establish the company with Suleiman and CEO Demis Hassabis, at a price of 650 million. Dollar.
The medical project has been controversial, and Suleiman is responsible for finding “money-making” projects
Before Google acquired DeepMind, Suleiman had been running DeepMind’s “App AI” department to find practical scientific research on AI technology in the real world.
DeepMind has always planned to use AI to improve health care. In February 2016, it established a new division: DeepMind Health, led by Suleiman. The department later developed to have more than 100 researchers.
DeepMind Health’s first product is a mobile app called Streams, which was originally designed to help doctors identify patients at risk of acute kidney injury and notify the doctor when the patient’s health deteriorates. . As this work required access to sensitive information about patients, Suleyman established an independent review team that included excellent UK healthcare and technical staff.
StreamsAPP
In July 2017, the UK’s data privacy regulator said DeepMind’s partner in the project, Royal Freedom Hospital, illegally provided 1.6 million patient records to DeepMind, a data-sharing transaction that “does not comply with the Data Protection Act.” The incident sparked widespread criticism and Suleiman apologized at the time.
But this is the only major setback for the company since it was acquired by Google.
On November 8, 2018, Google announced the creation of its own healthcare division, Google Health; five days later, it announced plans to merge DeepMind Health into its parent company, effectively dissolving the DeepMind Health team.
After last year’s privacy storm, DeepMind Health was merged with the newly formed Google Health by the end of 2018. Suleiman also gradually faded out of the new department.
The DeepMind Health brand was abandoned and Suleiman was removed from the day-to-day operations of the department.
Despite the recently announced 2018 earnings report, the transaction has not yet been completed.
DeepMind has done a lot of research on medical AI, and has published many results in the academic top journals in Nature, Science, and Medical.
For example, open in 2016Initially using AI to analyze retinal scans, AI can more accurately analyze scanned images for signs of serious eye disease, such as glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy, than trained human experts. Neural networks that have been trained to discover image patterns have also been used to detect diseases such as cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and kidney disease.
Last year, DeepMind Health partnered with the Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the University College of Ophthalmology in London to make a breakthrough in eye disease AI: the AI system they created can recommend treatments for more than 50 eye diseases with high accuracy. 94%, can compete with human experts.
There is also a recent paper published in Nature. DeepMind Health researchers, in collaboration with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, have developed a special pre-screening algorithm for acute kidney injury that predicts disease progression at least 48 hours in advance. DeepMind’s AI accurately identified nine patients who needed dialysis treatment in 10 patients.
In addition, the DeepMind App AI team has also launched other projects, such as Google Cloud’s text-to-speech services, and projects that reduce the cost of cooling in Google’s data centers.
According to The Information’s April 2018 report, Suleiman’s team is basically responsible for finding ways to make DeepMind profitable.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, did not publish a single business unit’s balance sheet in its earnings report, but according to a recent filing with the UK company court registry, DeepMind’s pre-tax loss increased to $570 million in 2018, revenue It is $125 million.
Since obsessed with philosophy and entrepreneurship, founded DeepMind with childhood partners
According to Business Insider, Suleiman himself was a social activist who believed that “capitalism is a failed society” and ethically talked about morality in artificial intelligence research.
Suleiman, born in 1984, lived on Caledonian Road in the north of London.