UNITED STATES: In a move aimed at consolidating its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts, Google parent company Alphabet has announced the merger of DeepMind, the AI company it acquired in 2014, with Google’s Brain team to form Google DeepMind. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, claims that the new division will “significantly accelerate our progress in AI.”
Pichai stated in a blog post announcing the merger that Google has been an AI-first company since 2016 and views AI as the most important means of achieving its goals. Many of the company’s main products, such as Search, YouTube, and Gmail, have been improved with AI. Google Cloud has also assisted companies and developers in utilising the power of AI. AI can address societal problems like climate change and health.
“We’re establishing a unit that will assist us in developing more powerful systems more safely and responsibly to ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI. The brain team from Google Research and DeepMind will be combined into one organisation, which will be known as Google DeepMind,” according to Pichai.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, will lead the development of the most capable and responsible general AI systems as CEO of Google DeepMind. Previously the head of Google Research, Jeff Dean will take on the elevated role of Google’s Chief Scientist, reporting to Pichai. In that capacity, he’ll serve as Chief Scientist for Google Research and Google DeepMind.
Google Research will continue to play a key role in driving fundamental advancements in computer science in areas like algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability, and responsible AI, according to Pichai, who also made it clear that Google Research will continue to report to James Manyika alongside his current Tech & Society teams.
AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence-to-sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, distributed systems, and software frameworks like TensorFlow are only a few examples of the accomplishments of DeepMind and Google Brain taken together.
The merger is expected to accelerate Google’s AI research and development efforts, leading to breakthroughs that will power the next generation of products and services.
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