Google has announced that the company is suspending service to the NudgeCommunity, which has received grant money from Google in order to encourage “cognitive skill training.”
NudgeCommunity was initially announced as a project by Google in 2016 and was given approximately $870,000 in grant money from Google in April.
Google says it will continue to fund the project, but the NudgeCommunity webpage is no longer available and Google says “the necessary addition of background sound should be ready in the coming weeks.”
Google is also not doing any cost-sharing with other research projects that use AI to improve cognition. Instead, the company says it will fund one “a dedicated research group with clear goals, methodologies, goals, funding and resources.”
Google says it will provide $40 million to AI programs that are “primarily AI-enabled learning” and under $10 million will go to AI programs that combine AI with other researchers and are most likely to be in areas that involve performing “supervised machine learning.” Google’s research groups and centres will continue to receive some funding.
Whether or not those programs are able to advance the research that started with NudgeCommunity remains to be seen. It’s a scary thing when the power of the most powerful company in the world has control over research and project budgets.
