Google has announced the consolidation of its AI research divisions, Google DeepMind and Google Brain. In an effort to maintain its position in the AI market, Google DeepMind will be formed, consisting of both research teams working closely with other Google product areas. The aim is to deliver AI research and products that will advance the field.
Google DeepMind will also create a scientific board to oversee research progress and the unit’s direction, led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, the VP of research at DeepMind. Eli Collins, the VP of product at Google Research, will become the VP of product at Google DeepMind, and Zoubin Ghahramani, the Google Brain lead, will join the Google DeepMind research leadership team, reporting to Kavukcuoglu.
Furthermore, Jeff Dean, co-founder of Google Brain, has been promoted to the role of chief scientist for both Google Research and Google DeepMind, reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google Research will continue as an independent division focusing on “fundamental advances in computer science” across various areas, including responsible AI, privacy and security, health, climate and sustainability, quantum computing, and algorithms and theory.
“Through Google DeepMind, we are bringing together our world-class talent in AI with the computing power, infrastructure and resources to create the next generation of AI breakthroughs and products across Google and Alphabet, and to do this in a bold and responsible way,” Hassabis wrote. “The work we are going to be doing now as part of this new combined unit will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs.”
Along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010. In 2014, Google purchased DeepMind for $500 million. In the years that followed, the lab would continue to get media attention by creating AI that can outperform human professional Go players and anticipate the shapes of intricate proteins.
A year after DeepMind, in 2011, Dean, Google researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng founded Google Brain as a part-time research partnership. It also made significant progress, producing tools like TensorFlow, a framework for building AI models, and improvements to Google Translate.
