Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently commended DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis for his strategic negotiation tactics during Google’s acquisition of the AI research lab in 2014. Speaking at a South Park Commons event, Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook (now Meta) had been in talks to purchase DeepMind before Google secured the deal for over $500 million.
“I did want to buy DeepMind, but they went to Google,” Zuckerberg said. “Demis was good, by the way. He totally did a very good job of playing me off of Google to get a good price, which I respect. Power to him.”
The revelation sheds new light on the high-stakes negotiations that took place a decade ago as tech giants vied for dominance in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. While reports at the time did not clarify why talks between Facebook and DeepMind fell through, Zuckerberg’s comments suggest that Hassabis leveraged the competing offers to secure a more favourable deal with Google.
Since the acquisition, DeepMind has focused on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), aiming to create systems with human-like reasoning capabilities. Meanwhile, Facebook launched its own AI research lab, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which Zuckerberg described as taking an “open-source” approach to AI development.