Co-founder of DeepMind placed on Leave from Google’s AI Lab

Summary

Google owned high profile artificial intelligence lab DeepMind’s Co-Founder- Mr. Mustafa Suleyman was placed on leave after a controversy over some project led by him.

Mustafa headed a particular division in the company, which finds practical uses for the lab’s research in health, at event and speaking to officials about the promise of the ethical guardrails and AI needed to limit malicious utilisation of technology.

Picture Courtesy: Infiflex

As said by a DeepMind spokeswoman, the co-founder is taking some time off for the moment after 10 hectic years of work without giving any proper reason as to why is he taking such a sudden break.

Mustafa did not return several email requests for comment. He co-founded DeepMind back in 2010 alongside the current CEO Demis Hassabis. After 4 years, the company was bought by DeepMind for 400 million pounds or $486 million, an ambitious bet on the potential of Artificial Intelligence that set off an expensive race in the Silicon Valley for specialists in the field.

DeepMind soon began working on medical or healthcare research, and eventually started creating a division dedicated to that sector. Mustafa who was nicknamed as Moose and whose mother was a nurse by profession led the development of the company’s health team, building it into a 100 person team.

But the company was heavily criticized for it work in the health sector of the United Kingdom. DeepMind Health’s first product was a mobile app named as Streams that was first designed to help doctors identify patients at risk of developing acute kidney injury. In 2017 july, the UK’s data policy regarding privacy watchdog said DeepMind’s partner in the project, London’s Royal Free Hospital, illegally gave the company access to 1.6 million patient records. Mustafa apologized regarding this matter at a later time.

In the latter part of 2018, Alphabet Inc. owned Google said that the team created streams would join a new Google Division known as Google Health. The DeepMind Health Brank was shelved and Mustafa was removed from the everyday running of the unit.

Conclusion

Mustafa sat on an external panel of experts Google prepared to review thorny ethical issues related to Artificial Intelligence. It was also reported that he later served on a smaller group in the company to vet a few particular projects, formed after an uproar over Google’s Artificial Intelligence contract with the Pentagon.