By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 23rd, 2024
The aim is to roll out the next generation of AI breakthroughs and products across Google and Alphabet by merging the talents at Google Brain and DeepMind.
As Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) intensifies its artificial intelligence (AI) effort, the company is merging its deep learning AI research team Google Brain with DeepMind. Although AI has been very popular recently, Alphabet has been exploring the industry for some time. The tech giant reportedly bought DeepMind for over $500 million in 2014. This was after Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) tried to acquire it in the previous year as tech companies focused on deep learning. Apart from Facebook, which employed professor Yann LeCun of the New York University to head its new AI lab, Yahoo also got LookFlow, a photo analysis startup, to lead its new deep learning group.
Google Brain and DeepMind are Becoming a Unit
While Google DeepMind is an AI research lab serving as Google’s subsidiary, Brain is an internal Google Research team. Now, the two forces are coming together to double down on the AI race, competing with rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the new group, Google DeepMind, is created “to ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI.”
Referring to Google Brain and DeepMind as world-class research teams, the CEO noted his confidence in the joint ventures’ ability to push the company’s AI vision forward. He boasted of the collective accomplishments of the Google Brain team and DeepMind, which includes Transformers. Others are WaveNet, AlphaFold, and more. Noting that he would be leading the unit, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis stated:
“Together, in close collaboration with our fantastic colleagues across the Google Product Areas, we have a real opportunity to deliver AI research and products that dramatically improve the lives of billions of people, transform industries, advance science, and serve diverse communities.”
According to Hassabis, the combination of Google Brain and DeepMind will help accelerate the technology company’s race to the future. He added that the duo must work with speed and strong collaboration towards the building of more capable and general AI. The aim is to roll out the next generation of AI breakthroughs and products across Google and Alphabet by merging the talents at Google Brain and DeepMind.
Executives of Newly-Combined Unit
As Hassabis heads the unit, Eli Collins is the Vice President of Product. Also, Google Brain’s Zoubin Ghahramani will join the research leadership team that reports to the VP of Research at DeepMind Koray Kavukcuoglu. Pichai also revealed that Jeff Dean would be the Chief Scientist of Google Research and Google DeepMind.
After Alphabet launched Bard in February, reports came in shortly after about the chatbot offering inaccurate information. This caused the company to lose $100 billion in value on the 8th of February. At the time of writing, the company is up 0.25% to $105.55 at premarket trading.