About a decade ago, DeepMind was a little-known London-based AI startup founded by Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.
In 2013, Facebook was in intense negotiations to acquire the startup as the AI race heated up. But those talks fell through, The Information reported in 2014. A year later, Google bought the company for more than $500 million, according to the report.
Reports about the takeover at the time did not say why talks with Facebook failed.
But in a recent interview with South Park Commons, a San Francisco tech community, Zuckerberg seemed to suggest that Hassabis was exploiting the company to negotiate better deals at Google.
“I wanted to buy DeepMind, but they went to Google,” he said. “Demis was good, by the way. He did a really good job of tricking me at Google to get a good price, which I respect. All credit to him. All credit to him.”
Zuckerberg did not elaborate on this point. Spokespeople for Alphabet and Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since being acquired by Google, DeepMind has focused on research into developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), in which computers have human-like thinking abilities.
Instead of acquiring DeepMind, Facebook founded its own lab, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which Zuckerberg said in an interview with South Park Commons is helping to provide an “open source” approach to Meta’s work on AI.
When Meta launched its Llama model last year, the company touted the technology as open source, which essentially means that developers, researchers or companies can access the innards of the model to modify Llama for their own use cases. However, some critics questioned Meta’s designation, arguing that Llama is not truly open source.
