Google Consolidates AI Teams to ‘Significantly Accelerate’ Progress

Google has combined two of its artificial intelligence (AI) teams to speed its progress in the field.

DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research will be brought together in the new group called Google DeepMind that is focused on “a new era of AI,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Thursday (April 20) blog post.

“The pace of progress is now faster than ever before,” Pichai said in the post. “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.”

Google Research will remain focused on fundamental advances in computer science, Pichai said.

He said in the post that Google has been an “AI first” company since 2016 and has used the technology to improve Search, YouTube, Gmail and the Pixel phones’ camera. In addition, Google Cloud has helped businesses and developers deploy AI solutions.

Highlighting the many accomplishments Brain and DeepMind have made over the last 10 years, Pichai said that combining their talent into one focused team will “significantly accelerate our progress in AI.”

“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,” Pichai said in the post.

As PYMNTS reported in December, companies have been using AI tools to support both front-end and back-end business processes for years, with a vast array of businesses both large and small, legacy and emergent, leveraging the technology for their products.

While AI has been the silent workhorse powering digital transformation across the business and commerce landscapes,  internet sensations like ChatGPT have taken social media by storm and put AI in the headlines once more.

Now the battle lines are being drawn in a new AI-powered search struggle between Microsoft and Google which will spill over into commerce as well.

With Microsoft’s most recent investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the firm is attempting to crash the internet search sector that Google has owned for 20 years.