Mumbai: A sessions court has set aside a magistrate’s order that had dismissed a decade-old cheating complaint involving an alleged fraud of over Rs 1.46 crore. The applicant, Vishalaskhi Shetty, pointed to a discrepancy in court records where a scheduled date in Jan 2024 was allegedly struck out and advanced to Dec 2023 without her knowledge. The judge held the lower court’s decision to accept a police closure report was flawed because it was passed “behind the back of the complainant” after the court dates were shifted without notice. “It is true that the… High Court directed to apply for expeditious hearing but it does not meant that after giving a date to complainant and before the given date decide the complaint behind the back of the complainant. The magistrate has to pass the order on merit after giving opportunities to both the sides. Therefore, I am of the view that the impugned order is not just legal and proper, it needs interference,” additional sessions judge M Mohiuddin MA said. Shetty moved the sessions court Nov 2024, after a magistrate’s court accepted the police closure report in Dec 2023. The dispute originated from a 2013 complaint filed by a businessman who alleged Rajesh and Kashmira Parekh induced him to invest Rs 1.46 crore in a specific healthcare venture. The duo allegedly diverted the money into a medical export company and failed to provide returns. Following the original complainant’s death in 2017, his wife, Vishalakshi, was substituted as legal heir to pursue the case. The police filed a ‘C’ Summary report, suggesting the matter was of a civil nature rather than criminal. While the Parekhs argued the complainant had failed to file a protest petition for years, Shetty contended the magistrate prematurely disposed of the case. “From the record, it clearly shows initially the advocate for the complainant was shown present and date was given to him as Jan 13, 2024. Thereafter, accused and advocate appeared, filed application and copy of order of… High Court (for expeditious hearing) . Therefore, it can be gathered that date was changed without notice to the complainant and her advocate,” the judge said. The court further emphasised that while higher courts had directed an expeditious trial, this did not authorise the dismissal of a case without a fair hearing. The sessions court has now restored the complaint to its original stage. The magistrate has been directed to reconsider the closure proceedings and decide the matter on its merits after providing both parties a proper opportunity to be heard, in accordance with previous high court directives for a speedy resolution.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis turned down a richer offer from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook to sell his AI startup to Larry Page‘s Google back in 2013—and a dinner at Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto home was the turning point. According to a new Wall Street Journal excerpt from Sebastian Mallaby’s upcoming book The Infinity Machine, Hassabis deliberately tested Zuckerberg during that dinner. He steered the conversation away from AI and into virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D printing. Zuckerberg sounded equally excited about all of them. For Hassabis, that was the tell. “Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all these other things,” Hassabis said, per the WSJ excerpt.Page, on the other hand, had made his pitch months earlier at Elon Musk‘s birthday party. He argued that Hassabis could spend the best part of his career trying to build a company—or he could use Google’s existing infrastructure to go straight at artificial general intelligence. Hassabis found the logic hard to argue with.

Hassabis used Facebook as leverage—and Zuckerberg knew it

The Facebook courtship, it turns out, was largely a negotiating tactic. Hassabis and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman used Zuckerberg’s interest to pressure Google into committing faster. Suleyman, a poker player by instinct, talked up DeepMind’s billionaire backers—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Solina Chau—even though those investors didn’t exactly have their backs in any binding sense.Zuckerberg later acknowledged the play. In an interview with South Park Commons, the Meta CEO said Hassabis did a “very good job” of playing Facebook off Google—and that he respected the move.

Facebook’s dismissal of AI safety concerns sealed the deal

Beyond vision, there was another dealbreaker. When Suleyman raised the need for an independent AI safety oversight board, Facebook brushed it off. Google engaged seriously—its then-CFO Patrick Pichette compared AI to atomic energy, capable of both catastrophic harm and transformative good.In January 2014, Google acquired DeepMind for $650 million—a figure that looks almost absurdly cheap today. And Zuckerberg, spurned, went and hired deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun to build Facebook’s AI research lab from scratch instead.