Google, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is consolidating its AI research labs Google Brain and DeepMind, into a new unit named Google DeepMind. This move is seen as a strategic step towards maintaining Google’s edge in the competitive AI industry and competing with other tech companies. By combining their talents, resources and expertise, Google DeepMind hopes to make faster and more efficient advancements in AI research, while ethical standards are maintained.
Google DeepMind will take the lead in pioneering advancements in AI, working hand-in-hand with other Google product areas to deliver AI research and products. Google Research, the former parent division of Google Brain, will still be a separate division focusing on furthering computer science, with a focus on ethical AI, security, climate and sustainability, amongst other areas.
Google DeepMind will be helmed by CEO Demis Hassabis, a scientist known for his expertise in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence. He is confident that by combining the resources of the two AI research centers, Google DeepMind will make greater accomplishments in AI that will shape the world.
Some of their achievements that were made in collaboration with each other include AlphaGO – computer program that beat professional Go players – and AlphaFold, a tool that accurately predicted the structures of proteins. Google also developed ‘word2vec’, ‘WaveNet’, ‘sequence-to-sequence models’, ‘distillation’, ‘deep reinforcement learning’, and distributed computing system and software frameworks like ‘TensorFlow’ and ‘JAX’.
Alphabet’s current Chief Scientist Jeff Dean will take on a more powerful role as Chief Scientist of both Google Research and Google DeepMind, with more responsibility to set the future direction of AI. He will be leading some of the most innovative projects in AI, such as a series of powerful multimodal ML models.
Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014 set the stage for a successful partnership. Now, with the Google DeepMind division, Google will be able to use the combined resources of the two entities to further advance AI research and development.
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