Google’s AI panic forces merger of rival divisions, DeepMind and Brain
Enlarge / Google DeepMind will presumably be getting a rainbow logo, but for now here's the old DeepMind logo. (credit: Deepmind)
Google's 'Code Red' panic over the rise of ChatGPT and its failure to excite the world with its AI products is resulting in a big merger. Alphabet's two big AI teams, the independent Alphabet company DeepMind and the "Google Brain" AI division, are merging to form "Google DeepMind." Google and DeepMind have both released blog posts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says merging the two units will "help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly."
DeepMind was a UK AI research lab that Google acquired in 2014. Since then it has lived as an independent Alphabet company, separate from Google, with CEO Demis Hassabis. DeepMind most famously captured the world's attention around 2017 when it built AlphaGo, a computer taught to play the ancient Chinese game of Go. This was previously thought to be an impossible task for computers due to the incredible number (10360) of moves required to play the game. Since then, the company has tackled protein folding, video games like Starcraft II, the Wavenet voice synthesis system, and matrix multiplication.
The Google Brain division was run by Jeff Dean. This group has kept a much lower profile by only doing research and making incremental improvements to existing Google products. The Brain team invented and open-sourced the "Transformer" neural network architecture that led to chatbots like ChatGPT. (The "GPT" in "ChatGPT" stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer".)