Google is finally merging its two AI teams into one group. Google's internal Brain team, which was part of the Google Research division, is merging its operations with DeepMind, the UK-based company that was formed in 2010, and which Google acquired in 2014.
In a blog post today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Brain and DeepMind will now be one group, called Google DeepMind. He stated:
Their collective accomplishments in AI over the last decade span AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training and deploying large scale ML models.
Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI.
Demis Hassabis, the leader of DeepMind, will now be the CEO of Google DeepMind. Jeff Dean, the head of the now former Google AI division, will now be Google’s Chief Scientist and will report to Pichai.
Google has been playing catch up lately to Microsoft in terms of AI innovations. In March, it announced its chatbot AI called Bard. However, its launch was not without controversy, and this week a new report claimed that Google rushed Bard's public launch against the objections of some employees, including many of its AI ethical team. Google is also working on its own AI art and video generators.
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