? Idiocy? You think anyone at DeepMind is an idiot?

Look, we can talk about the value of solving for something like Go/Baduk, even in just getting people to understand the power of RL (as it was predicted it would be another decade before anyone would be able to beat a master), or we can talk about the fact that DeepMind has dozens of concurrent projects running at any given time and they have models that have been trained in everything from Atari games, to Starcraft - to models that are embodied in robots or models trained on stabilizing plasma... But what I think is more important is you try to remember that none of these organizations is composed of idiots.

They are made of international teams, filled to the brim with people who have excelled in their careers and in usually everything they have attempted in their lives. I don't think you need to show respect or anything dramatic like that, but if you are approaching your critique of their actions with this assumption that they are like... Dumb. Don't. We can put aside that even your critique here shows you don't have a good understanding of what they are working on, because I think before all that, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't appreciate the depth of consideration that goes into basically everyone of their decisions. Even if there are missteps and mistakes, none of them come from idiocy.