As Google looks to maintain pace in AI with the rest of the tech giants, it’s consolidating its AI research divisions.

Google today announced Google DeepMind, a new unit made up of the DeepMind team and the Google Brain team from Google Research. In a blog post, DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said that Google DeepMind will work “in close collaboration … across the Google product areas” to “deliver AI research and products.”

As a part of Google DeepMind’s formation, Google says it’ll create a new scientific board to oversee research progress and direction of the unit, which will be led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, the VP of research at DeepMind. Eli Collins, VP of product at Google Research, will join Google DeepMind as VP of product, while Google Brain lead Zoubin Ghahramani will become a member of the research leadership team, reporting to Kavukcuoglu.

“Through Google DeepMind, we are bringing together our world-class talent in AI with the computing power, infrastructure and resources to create the next generation of AI breakthroughs and products across Google and Alphabet, and to do this in a bold and responsible way,” Hassabis wrote. “The work we are going to be doing now as part of this new combined unit will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs.”

Google acquired DeepMind, which Hassabis co-founded with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman in 2010, for $500 million in 2014. The lab would go on to make headlines numerous times in the years following, developing AI that beat can human professional Go players and predict the structures of complex proteins.

Google Brain was formed a year after DeepMind, in 2011, as a part-time research collaboration between Google fellow Jeff Dean, Google researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng. It similarly accomplished much, creating tools such as TensorFlow, an AI model creation framework, as well as enhancements to Google Translate.

Google consolidates AI research divisions into Google DeepMind by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-research-divisions-into-google-deepmind/