Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet. AFP by SAJJAD HUSSAIN/Getty Images
Google, owned by Alphabet, has consolidated its artificial intelligence research groups into one unit. This is the company’s latest move to keep up with the AI race.
The change will combine Google Research and Alphabet’s DeepMind Brain team into one team, CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Thursday. “Bringing all this talent together in one focused team of his, powered by Google’s computing resources, will greatly accelerate progress in AI,” said Pichai. lead the group.
Jeff Dean, who led Google’s artificial intelligence and research efforts, will leave the company as part of a restructuring, according to two people familiar with the matter. internal problem. In his new role as chief scientist at Google, Dean will work with both Google Research and DeepMind to develop new, more capable AI systems and will not oversee a large team. said the source. He will report directly to Pichai.
London-based Alphabet’s DeepMind has long been the parent company of Google, which has regularly introduced breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, such as AlphaFold, a technology that can predict the shape of proteins, and AlphaGo, software that learns to play. is known. STRATEGY GAME Try to outperform any human on the planet. Internally, the unit has typically been seen as a group working on artificial intelligence concepts that may not apply directly to Google products.
Google Research, on the other hand, was responsible for the “transformer” technology, a key building block for large-scale language models. This technology powers modern chatbots such as Google’s Bard and OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT.
Now, Google’s reorganization appears to consolidate its research work under one umbrella, Google DeepMind, demonstrating tighter integration with the rest of Alphabet. During Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February, the company announced that beginning this year, DeepMind will be included in Alphabet’s corporate costs to reflect how the technology is integrated into its other businesses. According to Alphabet, the investment will have a low direct impact.
James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president of technology and society, will take over as head of Google Research, Pichai said in a memo. The unit intends to continue its work in areas such as privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and responsible AI, he said. Manyika also expanded its reach when his Google executive, Clay Bavor, resigned earlier this year and took over as head of emerging technology projects Bavor previously oversaw.
Some of Google’s efforts to rush a generative AI product to counter the success of OpenAI have caused demoralization among workers, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant is compromising on misinformation and other harm to keep up with ChatGPT’s wild success, employees say.
