Report: DeepMind Vet Raises $14 Million For AI Startups

A veteran of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) unit has reportedly launched his own fund to back startups in that space. 

Vishal Maini, a one-time researcher for Google’s DeepMind, has founded Mythos Ventures and thus far raised at least $14 million for AI startups, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Sept. 26).

The report noted he is among dozens of Google alumni who have the money, expertise and motivation to help shape AI, either through investing, entrepreneurship or a combination of the two.

“I was thinking about space exploration, climate change, longevity and health care, and I keep coming back to AI; it’s the transformational technology for all of this,” Maini told Bloomberg. “It’s the sci-fi future we’ve always dreamed about, but humans are still in the driver’s seat.”

As Bloomberg noted, investors and businesses alike have poured billions into AI companies in recent months. 

Among those businesses is one of the biggest businesses on the planet: Amazon announced this week a $4 billion partnership with AI firm Anthropic.

“Incumbent tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others have been both partnering with and investing into today’s leading-edge AI startups in order to provide them with the computing power and cash necessary to power and train their foundational models,” PYMNTS wrote Monday (Sept. 25).

“After all, the AI business is an increasingly pricey and competitive one, with some analysts estimating that Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot, which is powered by an OpenAI LLM, needs at least $4 billion of infrastructure just to do its job,” PYMNTS added. 

The pace of this investment has triggered worries that AI technology is developing with proper regulation. Tech CEOs and national leaders have been sounding the alarm about AI, even if the powerful versions of the tech they’re concerned about so far don’t exist beyond research and corporate laboratories.

“The starting gun has been fired on a globally competitive race in which individual companies, as well as countries, will strive to push the boundaries as far and fast as possible,” Oliver Dowden, deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, told the U.N. General Assembly last week.

“We cannot afford to become trapped in debates about whether AI is a tool for good or a tool for ill; it will be a tool for both. We must prepare for both and insure against the latter,” he said.

For his part, Maini said safe, ethical AI development, something he focused on at DeepMind, will remain a priority. He told Bloomberg his fund will support seed-stage AI startups building “pro-social technologies,’ as well as companies with longer-term plans for AI’s future.