- Elon Musk tried to buy DeepMind ahead of Google because of trust issues, a new report says.
- Musk had concerns that Google could not be trusted with developing technology as dangerous as AI.
- Musk is pushing ahead with his own AI plans despite being increasingly vocal about the tech's harms.
Elon Musk made a last-minute attempt to buy DeepMind before Google finalized its $500 million deal for the AI lab a decade ago because he feared the search giant couldn't be trusted to create advanced AI, according to a new report.
The billionaire made the bid for the London-based AI lab towards the end of 2013 while raising concerns about how Google's then-CEO Larry Page would develop AI, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the talks and Musk's thinking. Google announced it was buying DeepMind in January 2014.
Musk's plans to buy DeepMind were informal and didn't reach DeepMind's board, the Journal reported.
DeepMind, founded in 2010, is best known for developing AI programs that can learn games and either equal or beat human players. Examples include its mastery of the strategy game Go. The lab has become an increasingly integral part of Google's AI ambitions, particularly as its core search business comes under pressure from Microsoft's integration of advanced AI into its rival Bing search engine.
On April 20, Google announced that DeepMind would be combining with Google Brain, a separate AI unit formed in 2011, to create a new research team that it said would "significantly accelerate" its progress with AI.
Elon Musk has become increasingly vocal about AI. He has warned the technology could lead to "civilization destruction." He has also criticized the rival AI lab he cofounded, OpenAI, for publicly rolling out tools such as ChatGPT despite issues such as bias.
Musk, who left OpenAI's board in 2018, has been particularly critical of the commercialization of AI, suggesting in an interview with Fox News last month that he put a lot of effort into creating OpenAI as "a counterweight to Google."
"I kind of took my eye off the ball, I guess, and they are now closed-source and they are obviously for-profit and they're closely allied with Microsoft," Musk said in the interview.
Despite the concerns Musk claims to have about AI, Insider reported in April that the billionaire Tesla and Twitter CEO was moving ahead with his own AI project at Twitter, having purchased around 10,000 graphics processing units typically used to work on large AI models.
Musk, Google, and DeepMind did not immediately respond to requests for comment.