Google plans to merge Gemini into Deepmind, effective next month

Big Data Digest is reprinted with permission from AI Technology Review, Author丨Zheng Jiamei, Editor丨Ma Xiaoning

Google has just appointed Nick Fox · replace Prabhakar Raghavan · Prabhakar as head of search and advertising, while moving the Gemini team to DeepMind, integrating the AI team.

According to Bloomberg, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's top executive who oversees search engines and advertising products, is stepping down to the position of chief technologist after four years of leading the company's core money-making business.

Raghavan is succeeded by Nick Fox, a veteran Google executive who worked under him as a search agency. Fox, on the other hand, has been a Google employee since 2003 and has in recent years served as vice president of product and design for the company's Assistant product.

In addition to this, Google's Gemini application team, which includes Google's AI direct-to-consumer product, will join Google DeepMind, led by AI lead Demis Hassabis.

It's worth noting that over the past six months, Google has been consolidating its AI-focused team, looking to improve the Gemini model to challenge companies like OpenAI and Thropic. In April, Google moved its modeling, research, and responsible AI team to the DeepMind division. Soon after, DeepMind was merged with the company's in-house competitor research arm, Google Brain.

Now that the Gemini team has been merged, it is reminiscent of Hassabis's vision in an interview two months ago: "Google wants to create a second Transformer, and it wants to combine AlphaGo and Gemini." ”

01 Netizen comments

Some netizens believe that in order for Google to regain its foothold on the AI track, the company should be merged with DeepMind and Hassabis should be the chief CEO.

Some netizens also lamented that the high-level changes can indeed show that Google is shifting its focus to AI, but it is still unknown whether the subsequent impact on the product will be good or bad.

Some netizens think that all this is reasonable, because DeepMind is a good team, and it is not wrong to merge Gemini's talents!

There are also netizens who turn on the boasting mode: this is good news anyway, because DeepMind is a good company!

02 The Evolution of Gemini: From Bard to the Rise of Multimodal AI

After OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Google realized the need to respond quickly to market changes, so it launched Bard in March 2023 and spread the word more widely at Google I/O in May. In December 2023, Bard was officially renamed to Gemini, marking a major upgrade in its technology, with the birth of Gemini 1.0. Version 1.0 of Gemini is described as a multimodal large language model (LLM) capable of processing multiple data types such as text, images, audio, and video. In February 2024, Google launched Gemini 1.5 Pro with an ultra-long context window of millions of tokens. Three months later, Gemini evolved again, doubling the context length of the 1.5 Pro to 2 million tokens, while also introducing the lightweight Gemini 1.5 Flash.

Key members of Gemini include:

CEO Demis Hassabis :D founder of eepMind, leading the development of general artificial intelligence systems and has worked on projects such as AlphaGo.

Chief Scientist Jeff Dean: One of Google's early employees, co-founder of Google Brain, involved in the development of TensorFlow.

Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research: Former DeepMind Deep Learning Team Leader, leading the AlphaStar project.

Co-Head of Technology Noam Shazeer: The core author of the Transformer model, the former founder of the Character.AI, responsible for the technical direction of Gemini.

Principal Research Scientist/Director Andrew Dai: BSc in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and PhD from the University of Edinburgh, responsible for Data Group Leadership at Gemini.

Principal Engineer Yuanzhong Xu: Graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he worked at Facebook and was responsible for codebase parallelism.

Jilin Chen, Head of Security Group: Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Peking University, Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and has worked in several research institutions.

The Google DeepMind team, which developed the Gemini AI assistant, is a new division formed by Google's merger of DeepMind and Google Brain in 2023, with Demis Hassabis as CEO.

Having said that, Google's move of the Gemini AI assistant application team to DeepMind this time is actually to better coordinate resources and research directions. Doing so will not only help improve Gemini's performance, but also strengthen Google's competitiveness against competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. Demis Hassabis also said that this merger will facilitate collaboration between the two teams, forming a more powerful "super cell" to drive the development and rise of the next generation of multimodal AI models.

According to people familiar with the matter, a new department leader will be elected for this architecture integration, and the competition in the security group is fierce. In the early hours of yesterday morning, Google also held an internal press conference on the integration of the department, and the specific changes that need to be made after the integration are still being discussed, but it is certain that this policy is expected to be implemented on the 15th of next month.

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