Google has announced that it is consolidating its artificial intelligence (AI) research groups into one unit in a bid to remain competitive in the AI race. The move will see the Brain team from Google Research and DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, merged into one team. The reorganization is designed to accelerate progress in AI by combining all the talent into one focused team backed by Google’s computational resources.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, will lead the group, while Jeff Dean, the executive who had been leading Google’s AI and research efforts, will move out of management as part of the reorganization. In his new role as Google’s chief scientist, Dean will work with both Google Research and DeepMind to develop new, more capable AI systems.
DeepMind has long been known as the unit that regularly introduces AI breakthroughs, including its work on AlphaFold, which can predict the shape of proteins, and AlphaGo, which taught itself to play the strategy game Go better than any human on earth. Google Research, meanwhile, was responsible for “transformer” technology, key building blocks for large language models. This technology powers the current crop of chatbots, including Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The reorganization appears to consolidate that research work under one umbrella, Google DeepMind, signaling tighter integration with the rest of Alphabet. During Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings report in February, the company announced that starting this year DeepMind would be included in Alphabet’s corporate costs to reflect how the technology is being incorporated into other businesses.
James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president of technology and society, will take over as head of Google Research. The unit will continue its work on areas like privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate, and responsible AI.
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However, Bloomberg reported that some of Google’s efforts to rush out generative AI products to compete with OpenAI’s success have left workers feeling demoralized. The search giant is making compromises on misinformation and other harms to catch up with the success of ChatGPT, workers have said.
The consolidation of Google’s AI research groups into one unit comes as other tech giants, including Facebook and Microsoft, also ramp up their AI research efforts. In recent years AI has emerged as a key battleground for technology companies as they seek to gain an edge in areas such as voice recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing.
AI has the potential to transform many industries, from healthcare to finance, and its importance is only set to grow in the coming years. With the consolidation of its AI research groups, Google is positioning itself to be at the forefront of this transformation while also addressing concerns about worker morale and the responsible use of AI.
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