Advised by Google or Advertised by Google ?
UK.gov is not being advised by Google. Repeat. It is not being advised by Google
Google is not advising the British government on AI, the Ministry of Fun assured this week, following the appointment of Google's Demis Hassabis as an advisor on AI. The US ad, search and cloud biz acquired Hassabis' company DeepMind four years ago and he has since been a Google employee. In the words of The Guardian, Hassabis …
COMMENTS
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Friday 29th June 2018 10:07 GMT Teiwaz
Advised by Google or Advertised by Google ?
Not exactly an exclusive club there, Google are hardly discerning.
Might actually be an improvement if they were, as much as can be said that's negative about Google, they are fairly efficient at IT, UK.gov is not.
What am I saying, we already know Politicians won't be advised on IT. They want 'press any key and criminals will be identified, prosecuted and incarcerated and then retire to a commons bar' *
* A button that makes the EU agree to everything (or just go away) would also be on their wishlist.
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Friday 29th June 2018 11:44 GMT Bavaria Blu
Industry 4.0
The Government doesn't even have a coherent Brexit strategy, let alone an Industrial Strategy.
What is good for Google is not necessarily good for Britain.
How about making degrees cheaper so that we have a better educated work force to compete in the world and not become a cheap offshore sweatshop.
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Saturday 30th June 2018 06:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Advice? No thanks.
Those of us working on government IT contracts know from bitter experience that they don't take advice from anyone that remotely contradicts top-down policy. That applies doubly for those of us who say things like "your deadline is batshit crazy" or "changing the tech stack for the 6th time isn't going to be the miracle you need to pull this off any more than it was the previous 5 times".
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Saturday 30th June 2018 07:03 GMT 142
A lot of probably justified cynicism here.
But I think it's possibly slightly misdirected.
Hassabis has never appeared like a Google drone. He's kept DeepMind as something of a rogue entity within Alphabet, and he's refused to take on other roles in Google.
He's taken this role as an honour (the guy's "for king and country" in a 1930s sense) and for DeepMind. I very much doubt he's pushing Google messaging in these meetings as such.
Whether this is better or worse, I'm not sure. DeepMind's is a hell of a lot more unnerving in the long term than mainstream Google.