Google DeepMind: Bringing together two world-class AI teams
Editor’s Note: Earlier today we announced some changes that will accelerate our progress in AI and help us develop more capable AI systems more safely and responsibly. Here is a recap of what Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shared with employees.
We’ve been an AI-first company since 2016, because we see AI as the most significant way to deliver on our mission. Since then, we’ve used AI to improve many of our core products, from Search, YouTube and Gmail to the incredible camera in Pixel phones. We’ve helped businesses and developers harness the power of AI via Google Cloud, and we’ve shown AI’s potential to address societal issues like health and climate change.
Along the way, we’ve been lucky to have two world-class research teams leading the entire industry forward with foundational breakthroughs that have ushered in a new era of AI.
The pace of progress is now faster than ever before. To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly.
This group, called Google DeepMind, will bring together two leading research groups in the AI field: the Brain team from Google Research, and DeepMind. Their collective accomplishments in AI over the last decade span AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training and deploying large scale ML models.
Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI.
As CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis will lead the development of our most capable and responsible general AI systems — research that will help power the next generation of our products and services.
Jeff Dean will take on the elevated role of Google’s Chief Scientist, reporting to me. In that capacity he’ll serve as Chief Scientist to Google Research and Google DeepMind. Working alongside Demis, Jeff will help 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.
Google Research will continue its important work leading fundamental advances in computer science across areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability and responsible AI, and will report in to James Manyika along with his existing Tech & Society teams.
I’m so excited for the next phase of this journey, the progress we’ll make against our mission, and all the ways we’ll help people reach their potential with increasingly capable and responsible AI.
