Alphabet To Amalgamate Google Research Unit And DeepMind For AI Innovation

Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. on Thursday announced it will combine part of Google Research (the Brain Team) and DeepMind to step up its efforts in artificial intelligence (AI).

The new group will be called Google DeepMind and will be funded by Alphabet’s unallocated corporate costs from Q2 2023.

This development comes as a follow up to Alphabet’s announcement of DeepMind, previously reported within Other Bets, to be reported as part of the company’s unallocated corporate costs reflecting its increasing collaboration with Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets during quarter earnings.

“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,” said Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google Research and DeepMind have been the names behind AI innovations over the last decade including 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.

“Together, in close collaboration with our fantastic colleagues across the Google Product Areas, we have a real opportunity to deliver AI research and products that dramatically improve the lives of billions of people, transform industries, advance science, and serve diverse communities,” said DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, in a blog post.