Alphabet merges DeepMind and Google Brain AI research units

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Alphabet is merging its DeepMind and Google Brain AI research units, ending a longstanding internal rivalry between the London- and Silicon Valley-based groups as it seeks to make up lost ground in generative AI against Microsoft and OpenAI.

The quake will leave Demis Hassabis, the UK head of DeepMind, at the head of a larger group that can lay claim to many of the research breakthroughs that have turned AI into the industry’s most important new technology since the arrival of the internet.

He will also take a more direct role in developing advanced AI systems that are critical to Google’s future business, after nine years of work in advanced research areas that were rarely directly related to the Internet company’s operations.

The move to focus Alphabet’s more advanced search more directly on AI models with a direct application to Google’s Internet business follows the great success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which posed the biggest challenge for the Internet search business of Google since Microsoft launched an unsuccessful challenge two decades ago.

Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said the retooling was designed to ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI and would leave Google with a unit that will help us build more capable systems more securely and responsibly. .

DeepMinds’ biggest breakthroughs have included its AlphaGo system, which beat Go world champion Lee Sedol in 2016, and AlphaFold, a system with potentially far-reaching impacts on medicine that predicts the structure of proteins.

In contrast, Google Brain, which was founded to apply the latest advances in neural networks to the Google business, has seen early successes in areas such as machine translation and learning to identify images without human supervision. Its researchers also devised a new technique for understanding language called transformers, which led directly to the emergence of so-called large language models and services like ChatGPT.

Jeff Dean, a veteran Google engineer who led Google Brain, will move to a new position as Google’s chief scientist, as well as serve as chief scientist of its joint AI research division. He will continue to report directly to Pichai rather than Hassabis, who has been named CEO of the new Google DeepMind.

Advised

The AI ​​retooling completes DeepMind’s slow assimilation into Google’s operations more than nine years after acquiring the London-based research group for $500 million. The founders of DeepMinds fought from the outset to be kept at arm’s length from Google’s other search businesses, leaving them free to pursue a research agenda aimed at developing advanced general intelligence.

Google took steps to make DeepMinds work more practical use several years ago, transferring its research on AI uses in healthcare to a unit at Google and building a team to try to apply DeepMinds research findings to your business.

In a sign that Alphabet was looking to leverage DeepMind’s work to accelerate its broader AI efforts while reducing its independence as a standalone unit, Alphabet said earlier this year it would no longer treat DeepMind as a a separate business within its Other Bets division. Instead, AI unit costs are now being treated as overhead corporate expenses for Alphabet, reflecting its role in developing key technology for the larger group.

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