DeepMind Co-founder’s Leave of Absence
Why did it happen and what information is out there?
I decided to look into the DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman’s leave of absence and skim the surface of DeepMind’s history.
DeepMind in Brief
DeepMind Technologies is a UK company founded in September 2010, currently owned by Alphabet The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France and the United States. The company was founded by Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg in 2010. It was aquired in 2014 for 400 million pounds or $650 million U.S. at the time.
After Google’s acquired the company they established an artificial intelligence ethics board, but the ethics board for AI research remains a mystery, and we do not really know who sits on the board. DeepMind, together with Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft, is a founding member of Partnership on AI, an organization devoted to the “society-AI interface”.
DeepMind has a unit called DeepMind Ethics and Society and focused on the ethical and societal questions. In October 2017, DeepMind launched a new research team to investigate AI ethics.
Recent documents filed with the U.K.’s Companies House registry show that in 2018 DeepMind’s pretax losses grew to $570 million with revenues of $125 million. This has been said to be due to its efforts to acquire the best AI talent.
What does the news say?
A few headlines or key arguments from different news publications:
- “Mustafa Suleyman’s retreat suggests AI group’s autonomy has been curtailed by its parent” — Financial Times 23rd of August 2019
- “Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of Google’s acclaimed AI lab DeepMind, is on leave, a spokesperson confirmed to Forbes. ‘Mustafa’s taking some time out right now after ten hectic years,’ the company said, describing the leave as a mutual decision and adding that the unit expects him back by the end of the year.” — Forbes staff writer Jillian D’Onfro, in an article 21st of August 2019
- “The co-founder of DeepMind, the high-profile artificial intelligence lab owned by Google, has been placed on leave after controversy over some of the projects he led. Mustafa Suleyman runs DeepMind’s “applied” division, which seeks practical uses for the lab’s research in health, energy and other fields. Suleyman is also a key public face for DeepMind, speaking to officials and at events about the promise of AI and the ethical guardrails needed to limit malicious use of the technology.” – Bloomberg, 21st of August 2019
Mostafa Suleyman
However we have to consider Mostafa himself in this matter. On the 22nd of August Mostafa tweeted:
The Islington-local dropped out of Oxford University at 19 to help set up a telephone counselling service called the Muslim Youth Helpline, one of the largest mental health services of its kind in the UK. He left the organisation at 22 to co-found DeepMind.
In DeepMind he recently led the project focused on AI and health.
In July DeepMind announced that its technology could now predict acute kidney injury two days before it happened.
“We need to do the hard, practical and messy work of finding out what ethical AI really means,” Mustafa wrote in a Wired op-ed in 2018, predicting that the study of the safety and societal impact of AI was going to be “one of the most pressing areas of enquiry.”
Mustafa and Hassabis required that as part of Google’s acquisition of DeepMind the company needed to set up an internal ethics board to oversee AI work across all divisions. Early in 2019, Google tried to create an external artificial intelligence ethics council, but quickly dissolved the project in the wake of internal and external protest over its members.
The App called Streams
Suleyman has been running the group’s “applied AI” division, which aims to find real-world uses for its scientific research, and previously led the group’s health efforts, including an extensively criticized 2016 partnership with the U.K.’s National Health Service. The collaboration gave DeepMind access to 1.6 million patient records for a kidney monitoring app called Streams, and its data-sharing practices were ultimately deemed illegal in 2017, prompting an apology from Suleyman and the company. Late last year, Google announced that Streams and the team working on it would be absorbed into Google proper, essentially dissolving the DeepMind Health group.
I found a few links from the BBC that covered this process:
- Google DeepMind NHS app test broke UK privacy law
- Google accused of ‘trust demolition’ over health app
- NHS to set up national artificial intelligence lab
Since then, the app has received considerable praise by hospital managers, credited with significantly speeding up diagnoses. “It’s a huge change to be able to receive alerts about patients anywhere in the hospital,” said Mary Emerson, from the Royal Free Hospital, in an interview with the BBC earlier this month.
A blog post from the 31st of July 2019
I decided to look back to a blog post about using AI to give doctors a 48-hour head start on life-threatening illness written by Mustafa Suleyman and Dominic King.
“Artificial intelligence can now predict one of the leading causes of avoidable patient harm up to two days before it happens, as demonstrated by our latest research published in Nature. Working alongside experts from the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), we have developed technology that, in the future, could give doctors a 48-hour head start in treating acute kidney injury (AKI), a condition that is associated with over 100,000 people in the UK every year. These findings come alongside a peer-reviewed service evaluation of Streams, our mobile assistant for clinicians, which shows that patient care can be improved, and health care costs reduced, through the use of digital tools. Together, they form the foundation for a transformative advance in medicine, helping to move from reactive to preventative models of care.”
Later in the blog post it was said that:
“This is a major milestone for the DeepMind Health team, who will be carrying this work forward as part of Google Health, led by Dr David Feinberg. As we announced in November 2018, the Streams team, and colleagues working on translational research in healthcare, will be joining Google in order to make a positive impact on a global scale. The combined experience, infrastructure and expertise of DeepMind Health teams alongside Google’s will help us continue to develop mobile tools that can support more clinicians, address critical patient safety issues and could, we hope, save thousands of lives globally.”
To conclude
As my wife’s father was afflicted with a kidney disease that was a major contributing factor to his early death it is very hard for me to stay neutral in this case. However what I can say is that we have to read beyond the immediate news and it has been interesting to try to understand slightly better the circumstances surrounding Mustafa Suleyman’s temporary departure.
This is day 83 of #500daysofAI writing every day about artificial intelligence.
