Google is merging two divisions to accelerate progress with AI

Google is merging two of its research divisions to accelerate its progress in the field of artificial intelligence, writes The Wall Street Journal.

These are the Brain and DeepMind groups, which will now form one Google DeepMind team. It will be headed by DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis. But Jeff Dean, who until now led the Brain group, will move to the new position of chief scientist.

“Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday in a blog post.

Earlier this month, he expressed expectations that the two teams would collaborate more often, noting their previous work together.

“I expect a lot more, stronger collaboration because some of these efforts will be more compute-intensive, so it’ll make sense to do it at a certain scale together,” Sundar Pichai said. “Being able to bring the best together, I think, will help us lead to better breakthroughs.”

The director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Christopher Manning, believes that this merger is a dramatic shift in the joint work of Google’s AI researchers, given the differences in the culture of Brain and DeepMind.

“Strategically, merging seems sensible,” Mr. Manning said. “Tactically, it will be hard to manage the organizational and cultural change.”

As you know, technology companies are now ahead of the curve in creating increasingly large AI algorithms. The programs have shown promise for a range of tasks, such as summarizing complex documents and conducting human-like conversations. It was recently reported that OpenAI adds plugin support for ChatGPT – an update that significantly expands the capabilities of the chatbot and for the first time gives it access to live data from the Internet.