Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is consolidating its two well-known artificial intelligence (AI) divisions, Google Brain and DeepMind, into a single entity in order to compete in the rapidly advancing AI landscape. This merge of the two highly acclaimed divisions will be led by the current DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and will concentrate on the “bold and responsible progress in AI in general”, as announced by the Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. So far, the joint team of the two divisions have created a number of outstanding projects, including the core which is used in OpenAI’s work. With the new integration, the Alphabet team is focusing on developing a new form of AI, “multimodal”, similar to OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 model that not only possesses the ability to generate new content via text context, but also allows for image input.
Alphabet’s combined research capabilities allows it to compete with its high-profile opponents such as Microsoft-funded OpenAI. OpenAI is the brainchild behind the Bing search engine, one of Google’s most formidable competitors. Furthermore, Alphabet is actively producing its own AI chatbot, Bard, to ultimately compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Despite the company’s attempts to promote the Bard chatbot and introducing it at corporate events, its value plummeted as a result of bad publicity generated by some inaccurate promotional videos.
Despite the issues that Alphabet has been facing, it is undeniably an AI giant. With their support, Google has maintained a market dominance in search, with over 80% of the share. With the merger of their two AI divisions, Alphabet is aiming to further strengthen their AI capabilities and stay at the forefront of the AI market. Moving forward, the combined team will be focusing on responsible and innovative modes of AI development in order to maintain their leadership in the growing market of AI.
