In a move aimed at winning the race in AI research, Google’s parent company Alphabet said Thursday it will combine its two AI research units, Google Brain and DeepMind, into a new superunit called Google DeepMind. Announced.this is accelerate development A general AI that can perform tasks across multiple domains, not just a specific one.
According to a blog post in deep mind, co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis will oversee the new research division. Demis founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google for his $500 million in 2014.
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Demis Hassabis is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in AI, having helped develop breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, the first program to beat humans at the complex board game Go.
“The phenomenal team of Brain and @DeepMind at Google Research has made many important research advances that underpin modern AI, from Deep RL to Transformers. Now we are one unit, Google DeepMind Together, I’m excited to lead it!” Demis wrote on Twitter.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the merger would ensure “the bold and responsible development of AI in general”, adding that it “resolves one of the most important technological challenges of our time. One,” he said.
He added that Google Research will continue to work with external partners and researchers and uphold ethical principles and social responsibility.
Move to improve DeepMind
The move to combine DeepMind and Google Brain could be aimed at definitely improving DeepMind’s performance given previous issues from a few years ago.
according to, tech crunch, Alphabet wrote off around £1.5m of the division’s debt in 2019, as DeepMind failed to break even and incurred significant costs. However, DeepMind is now reportedly making some profit.
Combining the unique cultures of Google Brain and DeepMind may pose tactical challenges in a merger, but their strategic advantages in AI innovation are worth considering. #GoogleBrain #deep mind #AI
— Dashant (@rajpdus) April 21, 2023
By integrating Google Brain and DeepMind, Alphabet hopes to leverage the combined expertise and resources of both to advance cutting-edge AI and create products and services that benefit society.
“The work we are doing now as part of this new integrated unit will produce the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs,” predicted Demis.
Google shakes off the competition
According to Alphabet, the team will work on multimodal AI, such as OpenAI’s latest model GPT-4, which can respond not only to text prompts but also to image input.
The tech giant has dominated the search market for years, with over 80% share. But there are also concerns that Alphabet’s division will fall behind Microsoft in the rapidly changing AI race.
The market sees this new venture as Alphabet’s attempt to solidify its position in the market as the race for AI supremacy intensifies.
1 Twitter user Ramzi “Who gets to AGI first? OpenAI, DeepMind, or http://x.AI, or could it be China that turns the tables all over, or could it be Russia? The race to singularity is reaching the finish line.”
A post first appeared in MetaNews about Google merging its AI research divisions to form Google DeepMind.
