Google’s “Code Red”panic over the rise of ChatGPT and its failure to thrill the world with its AI products leads to a big confluence. Alphabet’s two big AI teams, the independent company Alphabet DeepMind and the AI arm of Google Brain, are merging to form Google DeepMind. Google and DeepMind have published blog posts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the merger of the two divisions “will help us build better systems with greater security and accountability.”
DeepMind was a British artificial intelligence research lab that Google acquired in 2014. It has since existed as an independent Alphabet company, separate from Google, with CEO Demis Hassabis. DeepMind gained worldwide attention around 2017 when it created AlphaGo, a computer trained to play the ancient Chinese game of Go. This used to be considered an impossible task for computers due to the incredible number (10,360 ) of moves required to play the game. Since then, the company has branched out into protein folding, video games such as Starcraft II, the Wavenet voice synthesis system, and matrix multiplication.
The Google Brain division was led by Jeff Dean. This group was much more modest, doing only research and incremental improvements to existing Google products. The Brain team invented and open-sourced the Transformer neural network architecture that led to the creation of chatbots like ChatGPT. (“GPT”in “ChatGPT”stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”.)
DeepMind leader Hassabis will now be CEO of the new Google DeepMind, and Dean, head of Google’s AI division, will be promoted to “Chief Scientist”at Google DeepMind, even though it may sound like he works for Google DeepMind. CEO, CNBC report, which has an internal Google memo about the change, says Dean will report to Pichai.
If this dual leadership arrangement seems politically fraught, it is! A March report from The Information detailed that following the ChatGPT “red code”the Google Brain and DeepMind team were forced to “suspend grievances”built up over “years of intense rivalry”and work together. The report says the two groups “rarely collaborated or exchanged computer code with each other,”but they will now be co-creating “Gemini,”a recently launched project that represents a second step to rival ChatGPT after Google’s Bard. The Information described this single project as a “forced marriage”and now, a month later, the two bands are completely merging.
A major problem with Google’s Code Red panic is the company’s perceived lack of influence in the field of artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its partnership with Bing puts AI first as a core product, and it looks like Google’s AI technology has been left in the dust. That’s a big problem for the stock market, which seems to be Google’s core business these days. DeepMind has done a great job of capturing the public’s attention with research projects like AlphaGo, which have spawned tons of tech news headlines and the brilliant Go series “Humans vs. Computers”live.
However, DeepMind does not sell any products and only bills Google for internal work. All of Google’s work on creating AI in DeepMind and Google Brain has treated AI as a background assistant that does things like improve search or make small improvements to translation. The only exception, perhaps, was the Google Assistant, which was deprived of priority. In a DeepMind blog post, Hassabis seems to indicate that this will change, stating that the new Google DeepMind wants to “create a new generation of AI breakthroughs and products at Google and Alphabet, and do so boldly and responsibly.”