Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in...
by sseagull on Monday November 30, 2020 @02:10PM
(#25257575)
It would still be a significant amount of money for a lot of companies.
Remember, we are looking in hindsight that it seemingly paid off. A few years ago, this was just an educated bet; only the richest companies with money to burn (from selling ads) would be willing to take on that kind of a risk.
Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in...
by xbmcuser on Monday November 30, 2020 @09:36PM
(#25261662)
Only the energy cost savings google got from Deepmind probably already makes it a very profitable acquisition
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces-google...
Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in...
by ovi256 on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:05AM
(#25263932)
I appreciate this tremendous 3.5B subsidy that Google brought to basic ML research and R&D.
There is barely any multinational that has the freedom Google had of planning to spend 3.5B with no ROI. Their shareholders would sue and vote the managers out.
Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in...
by TulliusCicero on Monday November 30, 2020 @02:56PM
(#25258149)
That's the cost of running DeepMind as a whole, right? Which includes all the other stuff they've worked on, like games.
Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in...
by Seanambers on Monday November 30, 2020 @03:59PM
(#25258901)
Yeah, as far as I can tell, that's the whole lot of it.
And they had income around 100 million in 2019 but it's all against Google, so looks like a 2 billion +/- 0.5 operation so far, and who knows if they pay for compute.
Other articles place the runrate at 500 million per year in 2019.
Which means 500 million * 6 years = 3 bn + 0.5 purchase price. = 3.5 bn. So somewhere in the 2.5 - 3.5 billion range its seems likely as total cost so far.
Nevertheless doesn't seem out of reach for a multinational.