This is AI research, not product development. The project’s goal was to apply deep reinforcement learning to a complex and varied real world task. Google has no desire to sell trash sorting robots.
Google is cutting unnecessary spending across the company (including firing long-term, high-productivity employees) to save money. If Google doesn't want to sell trash robots, why fund this (expensive) work? Why not just shut down this division and instead, keep your programmers who work on ads, search, gmail, and other projects that bring money to google?
