Google has announced the unification of two of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) labs – Google Brain and DeepMind. Now termed as Google DeepMind, this newly consolidated unit will spearhead research and advancements in AI while maintaining ethical standards. This move seeks to position Google to compete with its contemporary rival, OpenAI.
Under the current structure of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, the DeepMind team has become the most prominent AI entity. This ensemble of experts from the world of AI has been looked upon as the key to ensuring Google’s superiority in the highly competitive AI industry, ahead of rivals like Microsoft or OpenAI. A recent report by the Information in this regard stated that prior to its incorporation into Google DeepMind, software engineers from Google Brain were developing an AI-based software – Gemini – in an effort to surpass OpenAI in this field.
Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, stated that the Google DeepMind team has been created with an aim to bring together people with the technical expertise and resources, to create AI products that are groundbreaking and ethically responsible. The spectrum of research accomplishments of Google Brain and DeepMind already ranges from deep reinforcement learning to transformers, and with this integration, their progress in AI is expected to accelerate greatly.
In compliance with Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, the research division of Google was left an independent unit, assigned to “fundamental advances in computer science”, covering areas which may incorporate algorithms, artificial security, quantum computing, health, and climate.
In tandem with its integration into Google, Eli Collins, the VP of product at Google Research and Zoubin Ghahramani, the lead of Google Brain, have joined Google DeepMind in the appointed roles of VP of product and Member of the Research Leadership Team respectively. Alongside this, Jeff Dean, the Chief Scientist at Google, was vested with overseeing the AI research and technical projects, playing a pivotal role in the development of AI models.
The $500 million acquisition made by Google for DeepMind in 2014 stands as a testament to the fruitful collaboration between the two entities. AlphaGo and AlphaFold, both developed in tandem by the duo, stand as exemplary products of this mutualism. Finally, adding to this extol, the team has created the likes of word2vec, WaveNet, sequence-to-sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems such as TensorFlow and JAX – tools that have effectively expressed, trained and deployed various large-scale ML models.
To further emphasize its commitment to AI, Google has announced a Town Hall meeting to transparently explain the new setup and its consequent implications for existing and new employees. By the end of this, the company strives to create a scientific board for Google DeepMind that is finalized and up and running.
Google serves as a front-runner in the world of AI research and product development. Its recent integration of Google Brain and DeepMind into one unit, Google DeepMind, has the potential to spark a new generation of groundbreaking advances that could shape the future of AI technology and its development.
