It seems kind of unlikely that Google is doing that in this case, (if so, the rev rate on new AI tech is insane, and, well, I'm waiting for our AI overlords politely), but I would be very surprised if they were pushing out news about their most bleeding-edge tech.
No - it's definitely not.
Go and walk down the street in any part of the world and ask how many people know about this acquisition? Nobody will.
Even the vast majority of technical people will have never heard of this acquisition.
There is no 'PR' at all, really, from this acquisition.
I don't think any acquisition in history was worth it's 'PR' value.
Unless there is mass market news on it, in which households are getting to know about it, then possibly, but even then, I can't think of a single acquisition that was worth it.
Zuckerberg bought some tech that enables you to wear 'masks' on your face while on video - when he made the announcement, it was fun (he was wearing and Iron Man mask) - and it got picked up globally. If they paid less than $2M for that company, maybe it was worth it for the 'PR value'. But even then it's shaky.
A) First, I would ask what they likelihood they have in making through trials, what is the real 'cure rate', what is the operational cost of the therapy, what kind of cancer it cures (obscure?).
B) They are not curing cancer. They have some intangible AI technology that doesn't necessarily or may not ever do anything.
As far as 'cutting the cooling bills on infrastructure' - there's no reason to think that that was an issue they were looking at solving, and used the tech as an 'example case' - but that some other, normal technology couldn't have solved th e problem just as well.
B) To confirm the ridiculous hype around this etheric technology, somebody, here on HN is equating this 'black box' to 'curing cancer'. Please.
Tell us, how the valuation can be justified in terms of dollars.
Which 'AI' products are useful in the portfolio today, that makes products useful to you and I, that are derived from DeepMind?
The fact is - 'AI' is really short-hand for Multi-layer Neural nets - and they are applying those things in some very specific areas such as voice recognition and image recognition.
I think there will be many more places where we can do this - but I think it's going to be a very long time before we get to 'true AI'.