Alphabet Inc’s Google has consolidated its artificial intelligence (AI) research groups into one unit, the company’s latest move to keep from falling behind in the AI race.
The change folds the Brain team from Google Research and Alphabet’s DeepMind into one team, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Thursday.
“Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” Pichai said.
Demis Hassabis is to lead the group as CEO of DeepMind.
Jeff Dean, who had been leading Google’s AI and research efforts, has been moved out of management as part of the reorganization, two people familiar with the matter said on the condition of anonymity.
In his new role as Google’s chief scientist, Dean will be working with Google Research and DeepMind to develop new, more capable AI systems, and would not be overseeing large teams, while reporting directly to Pichai, the people said.
Alphabet’s DeepMind, based in London, has long been known as the Google parent company unit that regularly introduced AI breakthroughs, including its work on AlphaFold, a technology that can predict the shape of proteins, as well as AlphaGo, software that taught itself to play the strategy game go better than any human.
Internally, the unit has typically been seen as a group that works on AI concepts that may not have direct applications in Google products.
Google Research, meanwhile, was responsible for “transformer” technology, key building blocks for large language models. That technology powers the current crop of chatbots, including Google’s Bard and OpenAI Inc’s ChatGPT.
Google’s reorganization appears to consolidate that research work under one umbrella, Google DeepMind, signaling tighter integration with the rest of Alphabet.
During Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings report in February, the company said that starting this year, DeepMind would be included in Alphabet’s corporate costs to reflect how the technology is being incorporated into other businesses — rather than as part of the “Other Bets” category of investments with less immediate impact.
Google senior vice president of technology and society James Manyika is to become head of Google Research, Pichai said in his note.
The unit plans to continue its work in areas such as privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and responsible AI, he said.
Manyika also expanded his purview when Google executive Clay Bavor left earlier this year, assuming responsibility for emerging technology projects that Bavor had previously overseen.
Some of Google’s efforts in rushing out generative AI products to compete with OpenAI’s success have left workers feeling demoralized, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The California-based search giant is making compromises on misinformation and other harms to catch up with the wild success of ChatGPT, workers have said.
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