Google merges two AI efforts into single DeepMind team
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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is merging two of its artificial-intelligence research efforts amid a scramble to keep up with also-scrambling rivals in the exploding field.
The company will combine the Brain team from Google Research and its DeepMind unit (bought in 2014) into a single group, called Google DeepMind, CEO Sundar Pichai announced.
Google has been "AI-first" since 2016 and "Along the way, weâve been lucky to have two world-class research teams leading the entire industry forward with foundational breakthroughs that have ushered in a new era of AI," Pichai said.
The two groups have accomplished a range of breakthroughs including "AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training and deploying large scale ML models."
Now Pichai hopes to accelerate progress by putting them together in one focused team, to be led by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis.
He also said Jeff Dean would take on an elevated role as Google's chief scientist (for Google Research and Google DeepMind), directly reporting to Pichai.
"Working alongside Demis, Jeff will help set the future direction of our AI research and head up our most critical and strategic technical projects related to AI, the first of which will be a series of powerful, multimodal AI models," Pichai said.