Google AI CEO Demis Hassabis on why DeepMind sold to Google: The Atari work alerted the Silicon Valley, and they came after my people

Demis Hassabis has given the plainest account yet of why he sold DeepMind to Google in 2014, and it has nothing to do with grand strategy. It was arithmetic. He reckoned that staying in the fight against the biggest technology companies in the world would take roughly $7 billion. At the time, he says, he was struggling to close rounds a fraction of that size. "The reason I sold was I knew it would require 7 billion dollars of investment," he said, adding that he "was barely able to scrape together 10 million dollar rounds at that point."