Google Waives $1.5 Billion DeepMind Loan as AI Costs Mount (bloomberg.com) 15
Alphabet's Google waived a 1.1 billion-pound loan ($1.5 billion) to DeepMind in 2019 after the U.K.-based artificial intelligence lab continued to ramp up the scale of its research and development. From a report: Revenue jumped 158% in 2019, DeepMind said in a financial filing this week. Sales were 265.5 million pounds, up from 102.8 million pounds a year earlier. Its losses also widened, increasing 1.4% to 476.6 million pounds. DeepMind's parent has agreed to continue funding the company for at least a year after the report's approval. Alphabet's Google Ireland unit waived repayments and interest from the loan to help cover DeepMind's losses. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 in a 400 million-pound acquisition that gave the Silicon Valley search giant access to cutting edge AI research. DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis's goal is to produce general-purpose intelligence that can solve an array of problems. It develops products used by its parent company -- like its system for making data centers more energy efficient and a program to improve the accuracy of travel times on Google Maps -- as well as AI with broader applications.
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No, I'd say it's actually a tax minimisation opportunity: the lending entity (Alphabet) now gets to write-off $1.5 billion. That's money that was always intended to be transferred to DeepMind, anyway.
Now imagine if you could 'lend' $100,000 of your salary to your non-working spouse, and then 'write-off' that amount as a 'loss' against your personal income tax. Spouse gets $100k tax free, you reduce your income tax.
Anyhow, I'm not an accountant ... maybe I'm completely off the mark.
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Interesting, I didn't know that.
So DeepMind adds $1.5 billion revenue against their $850 million loss, and pays tax on the balance ($650 million). But parent Alphabet still gets to reduce their taxable income by $1.5 billion. (?) Still doesn't seem fair. (If that word even means anything in this context.)
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No, I'd say it's actually a tax minimisation opportunity: the lending entity (Alphabet) now gets to write-off $1.5 billion. That's money that was always intended to be transferred to DeepMind, anyway.
Now imagine if you could 'lend' $100,000 of your salary to your non-working spouse, and then 'write-off' that amount as a 'loss' against your personal income tax. Spouse gets $100k tax free, you reduce your income tax.
Anyhow, I'm not an accountant ... maybe I'm completely off the mark.
Close but the 100k isn't tax-free for your spouse, it counts as income so they pay tax on it at their marginal tax rate. So if you are in the top tax bracket and your wife isn't this would be a could strategy. Just like if the parent company was in a high tax country and the child was in a low tax country.
Google to buy Brooklyn Bridge (Score:1)
DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis's goal is to produce general-purpose intelligence
You'd think that someone at Google would know better!
Up next, Google acquires Steorn. CEO Sean McCarthy's goal is to produce a perpetual motion machine. Just need a few billion or so to keep on with their cutting-edge "research".
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Nothing wrong with having big long-term goals.
SpaceX wants to go to mars. In the meantime, they have greatly reduced the cost to space and Starlink is looking very promising.
As mentioned in TFS Deepmind has delivered massive power savings for Google data centers and improved maps. Not mentioned is they have improved Google's voice synthesis. They have also been working on many medical uses of their technology including detecting many different diseases and protein folding. In protein folding they have moved
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Their goal seems to be to apply the same concepts to as many fields as possible to eventually create general purpose artificial intelligence.
This is, of course, total nonsense. It sounds reasonable only if you have no background whatsoever in machine learning.
But that doesn't matter when they are making cool products along the way
Sure. But lets not pretend that this is a step toward their nonsense goal. Building taller ladders and mastering mountain climbing will get you closer to the moon, but will never get you there.
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Google has attempted so many "moonshots" that now you can barely pilot around all the space junk.
Does one minute matter? (Score:2)
Does it matter if their time is off by a minute or two? Unless you're horrifically late and trying to do a Cannonball Run to get to your location on time, a minute or two either way is the least of one's worries.
What is worrisome is when you're in the middle of a city and Google Maps gives directions such as, "Take Highway 101 north to exit . .
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I mean, Google already owns DeepMind, so I wonder what the benefit of the loan artifice is.
Way more evil. Gates wanted to control the computing experience, but as long as you paid him (or didn't, he famously would rather people pirate Windows than buy an Apple or OS2 or Linux box), he didn't care what you did with it. Yes, he wanted to extend that control to the Internet (successful until government regulation), video game consoles (one of the major players)
Write me here a (Score:1)
Editors suck as usual, deceptive title (Score:2)
The loan was not waived, a year of payments and interest were.
From a cynical capitalist perspective, that will not help in the long term, so it appears google is waiting for something, then will let it fail.