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Google has announced the consolidation of its formerly separate AI research labs — Google Brain And Deep Spirit – in a new unit called Google DeepMind. The new team will lead groundbreaking AI products and developments while maintaining ethical standards. The move is widely seen as a way to position the company to compete Open AI.
“Combining all of this talent into one focused team, backed by Google’s computing power, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, in a statement. blog post.
Google Research, the former parent division of Google Brain, remains an independent division, focused on “fundamental advancements in computer science in areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability, and responsible AI. ”
AI research and innovation with world-class talent
DeepMind has taken on a more prominent role within Alphabet as the tech giant strives to maintain its edge in the highly competitive AI industry and fend off fierce competition from rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI. This is according to a recent report by the informationGoogle Brain software engineers are working with DeepMind experts to develop Gemini, generative AI software aimed at rivaling OpenAI.
According to Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, the creation of Google DeepMind will bring world-class AI talent together with the computing power, infrastructure and resources to boldly and responsibly create the next generation of AI breakthroughs and products.
“By creating Google DeepMind, I think we can get to that future faster,” Hassabis said in a blog post. “To safely and responsibly build increasingly capable and widespread AI, we must solve some of the most difficult scientific and engineering challenges of our time. To do that, we need to work faster, collaborate and execute stronger, and simplify the way we make decisions to focus on achieving the greatest impact.”
Hassabis claims that the research achievements of Google Brain and DeepMind have shaped the foundation of today’s AI industry, ranging from deep reinforcement learning to transformers. The newly consolidated unit will build on this foundation to create the next generation of breakthrough AI products and advancements that will shape the world.
“Combining our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress towards a world where AI helps solve the greatest challenges facing humanity, and I am incredibly excited to lead this unit and work with all of you to make it happen.” build,” he added.
From acquisition to innovation
Google’s acquisition of DeepMind for $500 million in 2014 paved the way for a fruitful partnership between the two entities. Over the years, they have co-developed several groundbreaking innovations, including AlphaGo, which triumphed over professional human Go players, and AlphaFold, an exceptional tool that accurately predicts protein structures.
Over the past decade, other notable achievements have included word2vec, WaveNet, sequence-to-sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks such as TensorFlow and JAX. These advanced tools have proven to be highly effective for expressing, training, and deploying large-scale ML models.
Google stated that an upcoming town hall meeting would clarify what this new unit will look like for teams and individuals, and that the composition of the new scientific council for Google DeepMind will be finalized in the coming days.
The company said Google DeepMind would work closely with other Google product areas to deliver AI research and products. The unit will be led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, VP of research at DeepMind, and will be guided by a new scientific board.
Jeff Dean will assume the exalted role of Google’s Chief Scientist, reporting to Pichai. In his new capacity, Dean will serve as chief scientist for both Google Research and Google DeepMind. He is tasked with setting the future direction of AI research at the company and leading the most critical and strategic technical projects related to AI, including a suite of high-performance multimodal AI models.
As part of the reorganization, Eli Collins, VP of product at Google Research, will join as VP of product, while Zoubin Ghahramani, the leader of Google Brain, will serve as a member of the Google DeepMind research leadership team.
This collaboration underscores the commitment of Google and parent company Alphabet to advancing the groundbreaking research of both DeepMind and Google Brain. And the race to dominate the AI space has immediately intensified.
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