Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has made a major announcement – the merger of its two Artificial Intelligence (AI) research units, US-headquartered Google Brain and the UK-based DeepMind. The newly formed entity will be named as Google DeepMind and will be led by Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind and a UK government AI advisor.
The primary goal of this merger is to advance AI research and make significant progress in AI development. Both teams will combine their resources and talent while maintaining the computational resources of Google to speed up their progress. Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a Thursday blog post that a unified team would be beneficial in accelerating the development.
The team is also joined by Jeff Dean, who used to be the co-founder of Google Brain. He will be the Chief Scientist of both Google Research and Google DeepMind and will directly answer to Pichai himself. Furthermore, Hassabis will oversee the development of the most capable and responsible general AI systems.
The tie-up of the two research units is a big development for the science of AI, particularly in the United Kingdom. This news has been welcomed by the UK government with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt tweeting his approval. He commented that there is still a lot of competition and a long way to go, but this is certainly a significant milestone.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported £400m thus making it the largest European acquisition of the tech giant. At that point in time, the DeepMind team was already performing extraordinary progress in computational biology and reinforcement learning. The need to combine forces with Google Brain to propel the commercial impact of these advancements further was felt by the company.
The emergence of OpenAI has made Google’s AI-driven efforts a bit turbulent lately. For example, the release of ChatGPT in November had Google managers in a state of shock. This was due to the implementation of the architecture developed by Google Brain called the transformer that is now being used by OpenAI.
With the union of Google Brain and DeepMind, the hope for Google is to eventually convert the science into products and services. With talented personnel at the helm, the future looks bright for the AI research unit of Google.
