Google: Google is combining Brain and DeepMind into one team: 5 things CEO Sundar Pichai told employees – Times of India

Google parent Alphabet is consolidating its Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts. The company is merging DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company it acquired in 2014, with Google’s Brain team to form Google DeepMind. In a blog post, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, said that the combined groups will “significantly accelerate our progress in AI.” For those unaware, Google acquired DeepMind for $500 million. Google Brain was formed in 2010 as a part-time research collaboration.
Their collective accomplishments in AI include AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow, training and deploying large scale ML models. Here are the key things that Pichai announced about the consolidation.
Google has been an AI-first company
Pichai wrote that the company has been an AI-first company for years and that the company sees it as the most important part of its business. “We’ve been an AI-first company since 2016, because we see AI as the most significant way to deliver on our mission. Since then, we’ve used AI to improve many of our core products, from Search, YouTube and Gmail to the incredible camera in Pixel phones. We’ve helped businesses and developers harness the power of AI via Google Cloud, and we’ve shown AI’s potential to address societal issues like health and climate change,” he wrote.
Meet Google DeepMind
“To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly. This group, called Google DeepMind, will bring together two leading research groups in the AI field: the Brain team from Google Research, and DeepMind,” wrote Pichai introducing the all-new AI division to employees.
Who will lead Google DeepMind
As CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis will lead the development of our most capable and responsible general AI systems — research that will help power the next generation of our products and services.
Who gets what
As to who will lead the new team, Pichai clearly wrote the reporting order. “Jeff Dean will take on the elevated role of Google’s Chief Scientist, reporting to me. In that capacity he’ll serve as Chief Scientist to Google Research and Google DeepMind. Working alongside Demis, Jeff will help set the future direction of our AI research and head up our most critical and strategic technical projects related to AI, the first of which will be a series of powerful, multimodal AI models.”
Where this leaves Google Research
As to those wondering what will be the role of Google Research moving forward. Pichai wrote, “Google Research will continue its important work leading fundamental advances in computer science across areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability and responsible AI, and will report in to James Manyika along with his existing Tech & Society teams.”