Google Forms New DeepMind Team to Develop ‘World-Changing’ AI Faster

Google is merging the Brain team from Google Research with the DeepMind team to form one AI-focused group called Google DeepMind.

In a blog post(Opens in a new window), Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained how “combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI.”

The Google DeepMind group will be led by CEO Demis Hassabis, who is the co-founder and CEO of the original DeepMind research team at Google. Jeff Dean, who was previously the head of Google Research, will become Google’s Chief Scientist and report directly to Pichai.

Hassabis and Dean are expected to work together to “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.”

In a separate blog post(Opens in a new window), Hassabis explains why a more focused team is necessary:

“By creating Google DeepMind, I believe we can get to that future faster. Building ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly, demands that we solve some of the hardest scientific and engineering challenges of our time. For that, we need to work with greater speed, stronger collaboration and execution, and to simplify the way we make decisions to focus on achieving the biggest impact.”

By taking AI away from Google Research, that team is expected to focus on algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability and responsible AI challenges. Meanwhile, Google DeepMind can set about the “next wave of world-changing breakthroughs” in artificial intelligence. Google is surely hoping that at least some of those breakthroughs will allow it to better compete with OpenAI and ChatGPT over the next few years.

Google acquired DeepMind back in 2014. Since then, the AI research group has helped teach computers to speak like a human, mastered the game of Go, used StarCraft II as an AI research playground, assisted with nuclear fusion experiments, and built an AI(Opens in a new window) that codes as well as the average human programmer.

Hands On With the Amazon Astro