AI competition is intense, Google makes another big move! Merger of DeepMind and Google Brain

While the competition in AI is in full swing for American technology companies, Google's parent company Alphabet will merge its Google Brain and DeepMind to help the company gain an edge in the competition in the field of artificial intelligence, which is currently part of Google Research.

Google bought DeepMind in 2014 for $500 million, and until now it has operated as a separate unit. DeepMind has been one of Alphabet's "other bets," engaged in innovative research, including AI. In 2015, Google co-founder Larry Page announced the formation of Alphabet to make new businesses independent of Google, which Alphabet called "other bets," and they are still part of Google.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on Thursday, April 20:

Bringing all of this talent together into a dedicated team, supported by Google's computing resources, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI.

Jeff Dean, who currently leads Google's AI efforts, will be promoted and given the title of Google's chief scientist, reporting directly to Pichai. He will lead AI-related "most critical and strategic" technology projects, the first of which will be to build a series of powerful multimodal AI models.

The move marks Google's latest restructuring in response to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, following OpenAI's launch of the chatbot ChatGPT late last year. Previously, Google reorganized the organization of its Assistant business to prioritize the development of the company's AI chatbot, Bard.

DeepMind's independent operation of Google's core research allows it to make breakthroughs faster, such as its AlphaFold, which can predict 3D models of protein structure. Previously, the relationship between DeepMind and Google's research and development departments was strained, which also forced DeepMind to seek more independence.

After the merger of Google Brain and DeepMind, it will focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition, Google Research will continue its work in areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, and responsible artificial intelligence.

Pichai's internal letter to Google employees reads:

Hello everyone!

We have been an AI-first company since 2016 because we see AI as the most important way to achieve our mission. Since then, we've used AI to improve many of our core products, from search, YouTube and Gmail to the built-in camera in Pixel phones. We help businesses and developers harness the power of AI through Google Cloud, and we demonstrate the potential of AI to solve social issues such as health and climate change.

Along the way, we've been fortunate to have two world-class research teams leading the industry forward with fundamental breakthroughs that usher in a new era of AI.

Progress is happening faster than ever before. To ensure the bold and responsible development of AI in general, we are creating a division to help us build more powerful systems more safely and responsibly.

The new team, called Google DeepMind, will bring together the Google Brain team and the DeepMind team under Google Research. Combining all of this talent into a dedicated team, backed by Google's computing resources, will greatly accelerate our progress in artificial intelligence.

As CEO of the new division, Demis Hassabis will lead the development of our most capable and responsible general AI systems – which will help drive research into our next-generation products and services. Jeff Dean will report to me in the role of Google's chief scientist. In this capacity, he will serve as the chief scientist of Google Research and the newly formed Google DeepMind team. Jeff will help set the future direction of our AI research and lead some of the most critical and strategic technology projects related to AI – the first of which will be a series of powerful multimodal AI models.

The move brings together our two leading research groups in the field of artificial intelligence. Their collective achievements in AI over the past decade span AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence-to-sequence models, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks such as TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training, and deploying large-scale language models.

Google DeepMind will operate as a flexible, fast-paced division with clear connections and points of collaboration with Google Research and other divisions.

With this change, James Manyika will now oversee Google Research alongside his existing Technology and Society team. Many of the Institute's technological advancements have shaped Alphabet's core products and features, and will continue to do so. As Chief Scientist, Jeff will continue to work closely with Google Research to continue to focus on a wide range of basic and applied research. This includes cracking the seemingly impossible, fundamental, and long-term challenges in computer science, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, that benefit the lives of people around the world, from algorithms and theories to privacy and security to quantum computing, health, responsible artificial intelligence, and more.

We are announcing these changes today and will have a new team in place in the coming weeks.

Please join me in congratulating Demis, Jeff and James on their new roles and continuing to work together. The Google Research and DeepMind team laid the groundwork that brought us to this inflection point.

I'm very excited for the next phase of this journey, the progress we're making in achieving our mission, and the way we'll help people reach their full potential through increasingly capable and responsible AI."