Alphabet’s DeepMind must clarify profit model: Panel
london — DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company owned by Alphabet, should explain how it intends to make money from its work with the UK’s National Health Service, a review panel appointed by the company concluded.
The panel also said DeepMind’s healthcare division needs to be more transparent about its relationship with the rest of the AI company, with Alphabet and with DeepMind sister company Google.
The public are likely to suspect that there must be an undisclosed profit motive or a hidden agenda without clarity
I would urge deepMind Health to be transparent about their business model, and their ability to stick to that without being overridden by alphabet Review panel
about DeepMind Health’s business model, the panel wrote. “We do not believe this to be the case, but would urge DeepMind Health to be transparent about their business model, and their ability to stick to that without being overridden by Alphabet.”
DeepMind, which is best known for creating software that could beat the world’s best human players at the strategy game Go, has a separate division, DeepMind Health, which applies machine-learning to healthcare. It has worked with several NHS hospitals to design an app that alerts doctors to patients at risk of developing acute kidney injury. It also has several projects looking at whether software can detect other serious medical issues from medical imaging data as effectively or better than doctors can.
But the company’s work with the NHS has been controversial. The top UK privacy watchdog said last year that one of the hospitals working with DeepMind on its alerting app illegally transferred millions of patient records to the company.
When DeepMind formally created a separate healthcare division, it appointed the panel of outside experts to conduct annual reviews of its work.
“The issues of privacy in a digital age are if anything, of greater concern now, than they were a year ago and the public’s view of the tech giants has shifted substantially,” Julian Huppert, chair of the review panel, said in a foreword to the report. “We have been clear from the outset that ‘good enough’ is not good enough for a company with such a close relationship to Google.” — Bloomberg