Google DeepMind is now the company’s combined AI team 

DeepMind is regarded to be one of the top machine learning and artificial intelligence research labs. After being an Alphabet company for the past several years, it’s now being folded in to form “Google DeepMind.”

The new unit encompasses DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research. Collective accomplishments from the past decade include “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.”

This merger is meant to “accelerate [Google’s] progress in AI and help us develop more capable AI systems more safely and responsibly,” specifically general AI systems and “research that will help power the next generation of our products and services.”

Combining our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress towards a world in which AI helps solve the biggest challenges facing humanity, and I’m incredibly excited to be leading this unit and working with all of you to build it.

Demis Hassabis

DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis will become the CEO and leader of this new group. Meanwhile, Jeff Dean will “take on the elevated role of Google’s Chief Scientist” for Google Research and Google DeepMind, reporting to Sundar Pichai. 

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.

Sundar pichai

Meanwhile, Google Research will continue working on “fundamental advances in computer science across areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability and responsible AI.” That team will report to SVP of Technology and Society James Manyika.