This is hearsay, but my understanding was that Hassabis' goal was for Deepmind to be winning one Nobel Prize per year or something like this, so I don't think he's personally up for the closed research model.

Plus also there needs to be a learnable, nontrivial 'strategy' to take advantage of, otherwise it's not going to beat simulated annealing except on speed. The couple of times I've used it in practice, SA was about as good as we could get performance-wise.