Google Brain
Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, Google Brain combined open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources. The team has created tools such as TensorFlow, which allow for neural networks to be used by the public, with multiple internal AI research projects. The team aims to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing. The team was merged into former Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind in April 2023. History The Google Brain project began in 2011 as a part-time research collaboration between Google fellow Jeff Dean, Google Researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng. Ng had been interested in using deep learning techniques to crack the problem of artificial intelligence since 2006, and in 2011 began collaborating with Dean and Corrado to build a large-scale deep learning software system, DistBelief, on top of Google's cloud computing infrastructure. Google Brain started as a Google X project and became so successful that it was graduated back to Google: Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X. In June 2012, the New York Times reported that a cluster of 16,000 processors in 1,000 computers dedicated to mimicking some aspects of human brain activity had successfully trained itself to recognize a cat based on 10 million digital images taken from YouTube videos. The story was also covered by National Public Radio. In March 2013, Google hired Geoffrey Hinton, a leading researcher in the deep learning field, and acquired the company DNNResearch Inc. headed by Hinton. Hinton said that he would be dividing his future time between his university research and his work at Google. In April 2023, Google Brain merged with Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind, as part of the company's continued efforts to accelerate work on AI. Team and location Google Brain was initially established by Google Fellow Jeff Dean and visiting Stanford professor Andrew Ng. In 2014, the team included Jeff Dean, Quoc Le, Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, Samy Bengio, and Vincent Vanhoucke. In 2017, team members included Anelia Angelova, Samy Bengio, Greg Corrado, George Dahl, Michael Isard, Anjuli Kannan, Hugo Larochelle, Chris Olah, Salih Edneer, Benoit Steiner, Vincent Vanhoucke, Vijay Vasudevan, and Fernanda Viegas. Chris Lattner, who created Apple's programming language Swift and then ran Tesla's autonomy team for six months, joined Google Brain's team in August 2017. Lattner left the team in January 2020 and joined SiFive. , Google Brain was led by Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, and Zoubin Ghahramani. Other members include Katherine Heller, Pi-Chuan Chang, Ian Simon, Jean-Philippe Vert, Nevena Lazic, Anelia Angelova, Lukasz Kaiser, Carrie Jun Cai, Eric Breck, Ruoming Pang, Carlos Riquelme, Hugo Larochelle, and David Ha. Samy Bengio left the team in April 2021, and Zoubin Ghahramani took on his responsibilities. Google Research includes Google Brain and is based in Mountain View, California.