Google's parent company Alphabet is going to lay off employees, and it is difficult for DeepMind to "stay out."
According to foreign media reports, DeepMind, a research lab owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, will close its office in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and cut some business personnel at its London headquarters in the United Kingdom as part of a recent cost-cutting plan.
A company spokesperson confirmed the news in a statement:
DeepMind made the difficult decision to merge its Canadian lab and close its Edmonton office while retaining its Montreal and Toronto offices at Google's locations.
But the spokesman did not confirm when the Edmonton office would close or how many employees would be affected. According to an incomplete LinkedIn page, DeepMind has about 18 employees in Edmonton and a total of 50 employees in Canada.
DeepMind's first overseas lab
In July 2017, DeepMind announced the opening of its first AI lab outside the UK headquarters in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, led by Richard Sutton, the father of reinforcement learning and professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, along with two scholars Michael Bowling and Patrick Pilarski from the University of Alberta's Department of Computer Science.
On July 28, 2022, (left to right) Michael Bowling, Richard Sutton and Patrick Pilarski celebrated their fifth anniversary at DeepMind's offices in Edmonton.
Three months later, DeepMind partnered with McGill University to set up the DeepMind Montreal Lab. Before this round of reductions, DeepMind set up small laboratories in Paris, France, Alberta, Montreal, and Toronto in Canada, New York in the United States, and Mountain View, California.
In particular, DeepMind's lab in Edmonton is the only overseas lab directly managed by the company, which makes "its operations require more resources", while other DeepMind "bases" are directly located in offices managed by Google.
DeepMind's Edmonton office.
After the closure, researchers at the lab could choose to relocate to another DeepMind office, such as the DeepMind Lab in Google's Montreal office, but employees in various infrastructure roles would be laid off.
But how the research program associated with the lab will be handled remains unknown. Last August, Richard Sutton, Michael Bowling and Patrick Pilarski published a paper describing DeepMind's Alberta Plan, an artificial intelligence plan for the coming period. This was originally a long-term 5- to 10-year plan for computational intelligence, but with the closure of the lab in Edmonton, the trio's research plans may be affected.
Richard Sutton, the leader of DeepMind's Edmonton lab, has not commented publicly on the news.
Google passed the "cold" to DeepMind
Since the rise of deep learning, Google has been a leader in AI. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, putting itself ahead of most of its peers in the AI race.
But it's facing competition from Microsoft: Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI has launched chatbot ChatGPT, boosting investor interest in the promise of generative AI, and the competitive pressure on DeepMind has escalated.
Meanwhile, Google's main source of revenue, advertising revenue, is under pressure from corporate budget cuts as consumers cut back on spending in recent times. Susannah Streeter, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "It is clear that Alphabet is not immune to the difficult economic backdrop, and fears of a recession in the United States are intensifying. Advertising growth is over... Competition is heating up, with Alphabet facing strong competition from TikTok and Instagram competing for its important YouTube audience." In addition to this, Google has amassed billions of dollars in fines in terms of regulation.
On January 20, Google's parent company Alphabet said in an employee memorandum that it would lay off about 12,000 employees and increase investment in artificial intelligence but reduce employees supporting related experimental projects due to the "changing economic situation." It's no surprise that DeepMind is affected by this.
Meanwhile, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Jan. 20 blog post: "I am confident in the tremendous opportunity ahead of us, thanks to the power of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investment in artificial intelligence."
Alphabet's layoffs followed tech giants including Amazon, Microsoft Inc. and Meta Inc. all started layoffs, and the hiring boom caused by the pandemic has made it difficult for these companies to withstand the effects of a weak economy, which has also raised concerns about the prospects for the economy.
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Reference Links:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9433340/deepmind-closure-ai-edmonton/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/alphabet-owned-ai-firm-deepmind-shutters-office-canadas-edmonton-2023-01-24/