As Google looks to keep AI pace with the rest of the tech giants, it is consolidating its AI research divisions.
google today Announced Google DeepMind, a new unit made up of the DeepMind team and the Google Brain team at Google Research. In a blog post, DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said that Google DeepMind will work “closely together… across all Google product areas” to “deliver AI research and products.”
As part of the formation of Google DeepMind, Google says it will create a new scientific board to oversee the progress of the research and the direction of the unit, which will be led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s vice president of research. Eli Collins, vice president of products at Google Research, will join Google DeepMind as vice president of products, while Google Brain leader Zoubin Ghahramani will become a member of Google DeepMind’s research leadership team, reporting to Kavukcuoglu.
Meanwhile, Jeff Dean, one of the co-founders of Google Brain, will assume the senior role of chief scientist for both Google Research and Google DeepMind, reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google Research will remain an independent division reporting to Google’s SVP of technology and society, James Manyika, focused on “fundamental advances in computing in areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability, and intelligence.” responsible man-made.” ”
“Through Google DeepMind, we are bringing together our world-class AI talent with the computing power, infrastructure and resources to create the next generation of AI advancements and products at Google and Alphabet, and to do it in a bold and innovative way. responsible. Hassabis wrote. “The work we will do now as part of this new combined unit will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs.”
Google acquired DeepMind, which Hassabis co-founded with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman in 2010, for $500 million in 2014. The lab would make headlines numerous times in the years that followed, developing AI that beats human and professional Go players. predicts the structures of complex proteins.
Google Brain was formed a year after DeepMind, in 2011, as a part-time research collaboration between Dean, Google researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng. He similarly accomplished a lot, creating tools like TensorFlow, an AI modeling framework, as well as improvements to Google Translate.
Since the acquisition, DeepMind and Google Brain have worked together in harmony for the most part, at least from the outside looking in. But there have occasionally been conflicts between DeepMind and its corporate parent, Alphabet (which also owns Google).
Senior managers at DeepMind reportedly tried to negotiate for years with Google for more autonomy, seeking a separate legal structure for the sensitive research they conduct. The talks were canceled in May 2021.
DeepMind has also struggled to break even with its growing expenses, which include the computing needed to train massive AI models and a large workforce (around 1,000 employees). the alphabet was forced to write off nearly £1.1bn ($1.5bn) of DeepMind’s debt in 2019. DeepMind is now profitable and reports a modest £44m ($60m) profit in 2020, compared to a loss £477 million ($650 million) in 2019. But its revenue depends almost entirely on licensing its technologies to other Alphabet groups, such as Waymo.
DeepMind has recently taken on a new importance within Alphabet as the company looks to beat rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI in the race for revenue-generating AI.
Information reported last month that software engineers from the Google Brain group are working with DeepMind employees to develop software that competes with OpenAI, known as Gemini. Recent pushes for Google AI products, such as the chatbot Bardhave been poorly received, causing Alphabet’s shares to fall precipitously.
Google: Threatened by Microsoft’s close collaboration with OpenAI in bing chatan AI-powered chatbot integrated with the former’s Bing search engine, is also reportedly investing massive resources into Magi, a collection of new AI-powered search features. Magi has a dedicated working group of over 160 people, newly formed as of this year.
“We have been an AI pioneer since 2016, because we believe that AI is the most important way to fulfill our mission,” Pichai wrote in a statement. blog post posted this afternoon. “The pace of progress is now faster than ever. To ensure bold and responsible development of general AI, we are creating Google DeepMind to help us build more capable systems in a more secure and responsible way.”