New reports this week show that DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has been placed on leave, although no one’s saying why.
A company rep speaking to Business Insider said that Suleyman was ‘taking time out’, and cited ten hectic years in the industry, implying that the sabbatical is voluntary.
The new brouhaha isn’t the first brush with mystery for a company widely renowned as a leader in artificial intelligence.
Since its emergence in 2010, and its acquisition by Google’s Alphabet, DeepMind has been making progress in neural networks and in creating technologies to pass the Turing test – to make computers think much more like humans.
Reports over past years showed how a DeepMind artificial intelligence ethics board is filled by shadowy figures journalists are unable to identify, although a new committee called DeepMind Ethics in Society reportedly includes Nick Bostrom in an advisory role.
Then there were benchmark reports like this one where watchdogs found several years ago that DeepMind was potentially working in shady ways with UK Health data.
“A new report by academics looking into Google’s agreement with the NHS over how its AI division handles patient health data says the company overreached or was not transparent about the medical records it has access to…” wrote Michael Grothaus at Fast Company in March of 2017, citing reports from The Verge. “The original agreement was billed as giving DeepMind access to patients’ historical records of relevant blood tests to look for a condition known as acute kidney injury, but the researchers say DeepMind was also given access to patients’ medical records dating back five years covering HIV diagnoses, drug overdoses, and abortions.”
Now, onlookers are again wondering what’s up with a lack of transparency from one of the most powerful companies in what is essentially an industry that craves openness.
Figures such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have warned us time and again that harnessing and controlling artificial intelligence is paramount if we want it to contribute positively to human life.
Consequently, people get nervous when mysterious things go on at vanguard firms that are pretty tight-lipped about operations in general.
Hopefully, more details emerge on what’s going on at DeepMind as AI ethics teams continue to work on giving all of us more agency in a quickly changing world.
