Report: Google DeepMind and Google Brain Join Forces to Accelerate Progress in AI

Google has announced in a post that the DeepMind AI research team and the Brain team from Google Research will merge to form a single unit called Google DeepMind. This move aims to accelerate progress in AI and develop more capable AI systems safely and responsibly.

The announcement was made by DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, who stated that AGI “has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic, and scientific transformations in history.” By combining the talents and efforts of DeepMind and Google Brain, Google stated that the company aims to build ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly, to solve some of the hardest scientific and engineering challenges of our time.

According to Hassabis, the creation of Google DeepMind will simplify decision-making processes and allow the team to work with greater speed and stronger collaboration to focus on achieving the biggest impact. The move will also bring together 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 in a bold and responsible way.

In the post, he said in part, ” 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.”

Google DeepMind will be led by Hassabis, who will be working closely with Eli Collins, the new VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani, who will be joining the research leadership team reporting to Koray Kavukcuoglu. The unit will also have a new Scientific Board to oversee research progress and direction, which will be led by Koray and will have representatives from across the organization.

This is just the latest AI-related announcement from Google as the company seems to be aiming to position itself well against competitor OpenAI. Google’s LLM, Bard, is still limited in release and is still testing to ensure a flawless wide release.  But with Microsoft’s introduction of generative AI capabilities to its own search engine Bing, it seems that Google is feeling the heat with this announcement.