Google’s parent company Alphabet has integrated its artificial intelligence (AI) research team into a division, which is the company’s latest move to avoid falling behind in the AI race.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Thursday that the change would combine Google Research’s brain team and Alphabet’s AI company DeepMind into one unit. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will lead the newly combined division. Meanwhile, James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president of technology and society, will take over as Google’s head of research. Sundar Pichai said the department will continue its work in areas such as privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and responsible AI.
“Combining all of this talent into a dedicated team, backed by Google’s computing resources, will greatly accelerate our progress in AI,” Sundar Pichai said. He said the creation of the new unit would ensure “bold and responsible development of general AI”.
Phoenix Network Technology “AI Outpost” has learned that as part of the restructuring, the executive responsible for Google’s AI and research work Jeff Dean (Jeff Dean) will leave management. Dean will take on the new position of Google’s chief scientist, working with Google Research and DeepMind to develop new, more powerful AI systems, and won’t be in charge of a large team, people familiar with the matter said. He will report directly to Sundar Pichai.
London-based DeepMind, formerly an Alphabet subsidiary, has long been known for regularly rolling out AI breakthroughs, including its work on AlphaFold. AlphaFold is a technology that can predict the shape of proteins. DeepMind also launched AlphaGo, a software that can teach itself the strategy game Go better than any human on Earth. Internally, the division is often seen as a group working on AI concepts that might not directly apply to Google products.
At the same time, Google Research is responsible for the “Transformer” technology, which is a key building block of large language models. This technology powers current chatbots, including Google’s “Bard” and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Now, Google’s reorganization appears to bring these AI research efforts under the DeepMind umbrella, marking a closer integration with the rest of Alphabet. Alphabet announced in its fourth-quarter earnings report in February that DeepMind would be included in Alphabet’s corporate costs starting this year to reflect how the technology was being integrated into other businesses, rather than as “other bets” with less immediate impact (other Bets) investment category.
In February, Alphabet hastily announced the launch of “Bard,” a rival to ChatGPT. On Feb. 8, the company lost $100 billion in market value after Bard shared inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event that failed to impress investors.
Some of Google’s efforts to rush out generative AI products to compete with OpenAI’s success have reportedly left employees feeling demoralized. Employees say Google is compromising on misinformation and other harms to match the massive success of ChatGPT.
