You know there was a lab that was cutting edge in Europe and it is still there - Deepmind - but the UK let it be sold to the US for a fraction of what it's worth today - $400m. We just allow US companies to asset strip the EU and then people complain about us never having big companies here...

Deepmind would likely be worth conservatively $200 BILLION today (probably more without the overheads of joining Google to be honest) or around 500 times the sale price in 2014, not a bad return.

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ronsor a day ago | parent [-]

How much of the current valuation is due to Google's resources and support, though?

"Sell company now and it's worth more a decade later" is the entire point; acquisitions are an investment and the investment is supposed to appreciate.

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andy_ppp a day ago | parent [-]

It’s impossible to know for sure but if they’d stayed private I think they’d be more not less successful, just because startups can move more nimbly. Although we’d need to define success, we’d be here forever…

	▲	FaridIO 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It wouldn't have. They had over a billion in debt, which Google casually fixed. Google then very conveniently supplied them with GCP server power. And remember all of this was in like 2014, way before the AI hype. They wouldn't have had access to capital to survive long enough to make it to today.