Zuckerberg bid higher but lost: Google's $650 million acquisition of DeepMind insider details revealed for the first time.

According to 1M AI News monitoring, journalist Sebastian Mallaby’s new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence, will be published on March 31. The WSJ runs an exclusive excerpt, for the first time providing a detailed account of the inside story behind Google’s 2013 acquisition bid for DeepMind and its fight with Facebook (now Meta). The book is based on more than 30 hours of interviews with Hassabis, as well as dozens of conversations with DeepMind colleagues, investors, and people involved in the acquisition.

In June 2013, Larry Page, then CEO of Google, approached DeepMind’s founder, Demis Hassabis, at Elon Musk’s birthday party with an acquisition pitch: “Your real mission is to build AGI—why not use the resources I’ve already accumulated?” Hassabis recalls that this line convinced him: “I was tired of running around raising money. I went to Google, got a huge amount of computing resources, and then solved the intelligence problem.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was also involved in the bidding at the same time. Amin Zoufonoun, Facebook’s head of business development, proposed a deal that would make the founders even richer: lowering the equity acquisition price, but providing the founders and key members with large signing bonuses. However, Zoufonoun was unconvinced by the AI governance agenda proposed by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman (now CEO of Microsoft’s AI division). Hassabis then went to Zuckerberg’s home for dinner, during which he deliberately broadened the conversation from AI to virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D printing, and found that Zuckerberg was equally excited about all technologies. “That told me everything I needed to know,” Hassabis later said. “Facebook’s offer was higher, but I wanted someone who truly understood why AI mattered more than everything else.”

During the negotiations, Suleyman used a poker player’s instinct for bluffing to emphasize to Google that DeepMind had wealthy backers behind it—Peter Thiel, Musk, and others (“of course, these people weren’t actually supporting us”). Hassabis set several conditions for the sale: keep DeepMind in London, ban military applications, and establish an independent ethics and safety review committee made up of external scientists and philosophers, to dilute Google’s control over the technology. Don Harrison, Google’s chief negotiator, said these conditions were “a big problem for me,” but he ultimately relented because “unless we were absolutely sure that Demis represented the future of our AI strategy, we couldn’t agree to that structure.”

At the end of January 2014, Google completed the acquisition for $650 million. The rejected Zuckerberg immediately recruited the deep learning pioneer and New York University professor Yann LeCun to build Facebook AI Laboratory. After taking office, LeCun immediately tried to poach key researchers from DeepMind. In the book, Mallaby calls the acquisition “a bargain by today’s standards,” and says the real payoff was gradually realized over the following decade, as Google poured tens of billions of dollars into research funding for DeepMind.