- This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step to mitigating those fears.
- Google has currently given ~300M to Anthropic and has a partnership with them. I assume Google continues to see potential in both avenues and won't neglect one AI team for the other. I'm guessing that DeepMind will be their primary focus because of the numerous, real-world applications already at play.
- It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. They seem to be very different approaches. Yet, they both have support for language and imagery. So, perhaps they aren't that different afterall?
- Still waiting to hear more from Google on how they plan to leverage their novel PaLM architecture. The API for it was released a month ago, but, to my awareness, has yet to take the world by storm. (Q: Bard isn't powered by PaLM, right?)
Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area. I trust DeepMind's team and I trust Google's research teams, but Google's ability to execute and take products to market has been quite weak thus far. My gut says this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy.
Yes the team which literally created transformer and almost all the important open research including Bert, T5, imagen, RLHF, ViT don't have the ability to execute on AI /s. Tell me one innovation OpenAI bought into the field. They are good at execution but i havent seen anything novel coming out of them.
This, but non-sarcastically. Google has spectacularly, so far, failed to execute on products (even of the “selling shovels” kind, much less end-user products) for generative AI, despite both having lots of consumer products to which it is naturally adaptable and a lot of the fundamental research work in generative AI.
The best explanation is that they actually are, institutionally and structurally, bad at execution in this domain, because they have all the pieces and incentives that rule out most of the other potential explanations for that.
> OpenAI bought into the field. They are good at execution but i havent seen anything novel coming out of them.
Right, OpenAI is good at execution (at least, when it comes to selling-shovels tools, I don’t see a lot of evidence beyond that yet), whereas Google is, to all current evidence, not good at execution in this space.
edit: I forgot all about google_maps.zip / waze.gz and all the juicy traffic data coming from android.. which probably already relies heavily on AI
I wouldn't bet against Google DeepMind originating the next big thing, at the very least, their odds are higher than OpenAIs.
Edit: this may yet turn out to be a Google+ moment, where an upstart spooks Google into thinking it is fighting an existential battle but winds up okay after some major missteps that take years to fix (YouTube comments as a real-name social network. Yuck)
You're reiterating their point. Yeah, Google has competent AI people but that means nothing for their own success if they can't execute. OpenAI has proven that.
Yet Google does not have a slam-dunk product despite so many great research results. This looks a gross failure of the CEO, especially given that he's been chanting AI First in the past few years.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.01325.pdf
CLIP also seems novel?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashish-vaswani-99892181/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/noam-shazeer-3b27288/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikiparmar/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakob-uszkoreit-b238b51/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidangomez/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/illia-polosukhin-77b6538/
Only one remains at Google:
Execution is 9/10 of the battle.
It might help to reflect on what the upsides of this have been for OpenAI, re execution.
On the face of it, execution is often all that matters. FB v myspace, AMD v Intel (eventually), Uber v Lyft, MS v Apple (pre 2001), Apple v MS (post 2001) etc.
Yes yes that’s right the algorithm is the most important part.
There were plenty of touch screen phones before the iphone.
Google is great at research, one of the best companies in the world. They are also not very good at product. It will not be possible for Google to research their way out of the business problems they’re facing. They may win, but if so it will be because they get good at product, not because the transformers research team comes up with something even more amazing.
But ya their strong point is execution and doing the hundreds of little things that make the model do well and it turns out that that's more important than "novel" ideas
While PaLM demolished benchmarks scores openai with a chat tune of a sizeable but not unwieldy model took the world by storm.
Reread the comment you are replying to. It explicitly said that the research is good.
So OpenAI it is.
It's not a matter of skill as much as objective. And DeepMind would still be starting at zero if they decide to pivot to products.
Is it tough because one of these is a newly merged and rebranded team and the other is a machine learning model?
I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google.
Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research paper game and into the product game.
Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward. Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment between the company's goals and those of the employees.
Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine, but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't that wealthy.
DeepMind has researched and developed features that exist in many Google products today, e.g. Wavenet: https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/waven...
This was paid by Google for unspecified research services. But the way it’s accounted for it’s likely that it was based on some legitimate contribution. It is unlikely it would be structured this way if it was just corporate support.
DeepMind has public financial filings and you can go read the exact language they use to describe the revenue they generate.
You could say the same about OpenAI and Microsoft, they drained money for years until about 6 months ago when suddenly the partnership started to pay back big style.
The existing, top-performing product teams at Google should be taking that research and building products around it. If Google has any top-performing product teams left, that is...
is this a influx of resources, or consolidation and cutbacks? i read it as google used to have two different ai research teams, and now they have one fewer than they used to.
they've shut down at least one deepmind office recently: https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmon...
> Announcing Google DeepMind... launched DeepMind back in 2010 ...
The first casualty was Nest shutting down its APIs, cutting off an ecosystem of third party integrations.
The next casualty was replacing the Nest app with the Google Home app. I stopped following Nest after that because I sold all the Nest stuff I owned and replaced it all with HomeKit.
It's astounding how Google keeps doing this, and its shareholders seem to go along with it. I agree, given their track record, its hard to be optimistic about anything Google slaps their name in front of.
What a shortsighted statement for a race that has barely gotten out of the gates. But, if any one company should be panicking then it's OpenAI at the thought of losing their minimal lead and getting crushed by the company, that invented most of the technology they use, put a significant amount of resources behind their AI initiatives.
Google Search had an outage yesterday. Google just underwent its first round of layoffs ever which definitely affects internal morale and makes all employees aware of their company's mortality. Google's CEO was in the news last week for hiding communications while under a legal hold. Google stock tanked with the rushed demo of Bard. And, even if all those things weren't true, Google has continually failed to establish revenue streams independent from ads and continually abandons products that don't meet their expectations. Consumer confidence in new Google product announcements is lower than any other major tech company - the default assumption is that the product will be pulled months/years later.
Microsoft is giving their full support to OpenAI through their 49% partnership. $13B investment compared to Google buying DeepMind for $500M and investing $300M in Anthropic. Microsoft has good working agreements with the US government, a long history of unreasonable support for their flagship products, clawed their way back to being one of the most valuable companies in the world by finding diverse revenue streams, and, frankly, comes across as the wise adult in the room given they already had their day in the sun with legal battles.
I agree completely that if there continue to be marked revolutions in AI that invalidate current SOTA then those innovations are likely to arise from Google's research labs, but from an execution standpoint I have nothing but concerns for Google. It's crazy that I feel they need a second chance in the AI revolution when LLMs originated from inside their org just a few years ago. And it's not like they don't feel similarly - there've been countless articles about "Code Red" at Google as they try to rapidly adjust their strategy around AI.
I think OpenAI has a wider leader than people are acknowledging. It's like everyone was forced to show their AI-hand the last couple of months, in an attempt to appease shareholders, and it seemed like a fair fight until GPT4 hit the ground running. Now we're looking at agents and multi-modal support ontop of $200M/yr revenue when everyone else has no business plan and has yet to announce any looming upgrades. At a certain point, first-mover advantage compounds, the foremost AI app store becomes established, and people building commercial products will become entrenched.
You are comparing an organization to a DNN model? It would be tough for anybody.
One day, with AGI and autonomous agents, the goal will be to merge neural network meshes together in order to gather highly specialized datasets.
Google trying to "win" the super-human AGI race is even more flawed than a nation trying to "win" the nuclear arms race.
At least with a nuclear arms race we all die quickly. Super-human AGI will probably just bring about unthinkable levels of suffering before finally killing us all.
How did they drop the ball so hard? OpenAI has been around for less than a decade and as a smaller team with less resources was able to make a better product.
Think about how many decades head start IBM had to perfect search, but search wasn't their core competency.
Delivering advertisements is Google's core competency.
Google still thinks of AI as a research project, or at best a way to produce better search results. They essentially created the entire current generation of the AI space and then... gave it away, because no one on the product side understood what they had actually built. Handing the reins to the DeepMind team – who have never launched a single product in their history – seems to be a doubling down on that same failed strategy.
Google doesn't need more smart AI researchers, academics or ethicists. They need product managers who understand the underlying technology and can commercialize it. They need pragmatic engineers who can execute, launch and maintain services. That has always been their problem as a company.
I was at the non-Brain part of Research and it was seen as Google Brain is the "cool", pure research one, dealing with some future abstract AI and not caring for the products, feasibility, or even if the research "could" be made practical any day.
Deepmind was an "extreme" version of it, with some animosities and politics between the two, which I didn't follow too closely. There were attempts at making Deepmind useful, called "Deepmind for Google", but the people there were... clueless. Though one really cool thing came out of it (XManager).
(I was at a closer to the product part, "Perception", which I loved. And still got to publish, explore, pursue my own research goals, etc.)
I was next to the team that created Allo’s chat bot, but they said that they had to take out most cool stuff because legal didn’t allow it to launch, so they had to dumb it down totally.
I believe the main problem was all the ethics/safety teams that just hired a lot of non-programmers, while OpenAI management treated safety as an engineering problem that has to be solved with a technical solution.
iPhone scared the shit out of the phone market and today we have great phones from Samsung and Google which dominate the market. If everyone was trying to predict the smartphone market in 2007 they'd be talking about how Nokia missed the boat but excited to see their response (or Motorola/Sony/Blackberry etc). The market today won't necessarily be the market in 10yrs from now. It might be Google, they have a solid head start to be #2 and future #1, but who knows what will happen and whether that talent/advantage stays in Google.
It could just as easily be other companies we don't even consider serious players today.
(I was on the XManager team in Platform.)
Internally, everyone's asking "How will this help my promo packet?"
And yet here we are. If anything it’s a great example of how a “money printer” business, Google’s ad business, makes an org into a lazy, risk averse and accumulates an army of empire builders who collectively breed promo culture.
Combine that with a decade of 0% interest rates which also boosted its stock price and it’s no wonder that Google is struggling on so many fronts.
They’ll figure it out.
I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which this is by design, from the very top of Google. Different Google and other Alphabet companies' executives more than once told me they just weren't interested in products that didn't have an obvious path to more than 1 billion users. The companies don't have a clue how to make money retail. If they can't print money with an idea, they don't have the tools and skills to bring it to market.
They literally put more effort and resources into rigging ads auctions than trying to solve real user problems.
Yes, the answer isn't what you'd like, but let's not pretend it's not rational.
How do you make enterprise tools better? (Photoshop + AI, Code + AI etc.) How do you make consumer tools better? (YT tools + AI) How do you make search better?
etc. etc.
Not the job description Google has for engineers. Their hiring process effectively eliminates anyone who matches that description and bothers to put themselves through it.
They don't pay me, so I don't care about their profits, but the stuff they've more-or-less given away and people don't think much about is their best stuff. Colab, Docs, Scholar, etc...
Google's revenue is equal to the GDP of New Zealand. Google's cash reserves are sufficient to sustain the company through half a century of bad quarters. Not that they have had any bad quarters, ever.
They don't need anything.
Their ad business is a donkey that shits gold, with Chrome and Android keeping the competition locked out, and everything else doesn't matter for Google as a company. They've done little more than play around for the last decade, with an endless procession of hyped-then-canceled "products", and it hasn't affected their market dominance in the slightest.
They can keep fucking up for the foreseeable future, and it won't really matter. If a startup emerges that appears to have the right approach to AI, Google can simply buy it. Power is power, and everything else is nothing.
I already use phind.com almost as much as I use Google. A significant percentage of the non-development "queries" that I have, I now ask ChatGPT 4.
I'm starting to suspect that within a year, I won't be using Google search much at all.
That should terrify everyone at Alphabet Inc.
Every untouchable business inevitably gets disrupted once the company can no longer stay competitive and get ahead of new trends. Same is happening with Google today.
I would say they more need engineers who care about and can make good products. In my limited experience, it takes time to turn a research-focused group into a product-oriented team. Research vs production requires different skill sets.
It’s curious how predictable it is that a major player is going to fall into this trap at any point in time. There’s probably some way you could measure its likelihood if you were tracking internal comms, org charts and maybe some finely designed survey data.
and more because Google's mission was to "organize world information" instead of understanding, intepreting & utilizing world information.
Research is great, but when there’s no platform, nothing stands.
Among some of the biggest flop in history by starting so late.
We’ll have to see how their generative text to videos do.
If we wind way back to Google Docs, Gmail and Android strategy, they took market share from leaders by giving away high quality products. If I were in charge of strategy there, I would double down on the Stability / Facebook plan, and open source PaLM architecture Chinchilla-optimal foundation models stat. Then I'd build tooling to run and customize the models over GCP, so open + cloud. I'd probably start selling TPUv4 racks immediately as well. I don't believe they can win on a direct API business model this cycle. But, I think they could do a form of embrace and extend by going radically open and leveraging their research + deployment skills.
And indeed Google AI has achieved very little product wise during his time as CEO. Kind of suggests he is a big part of bureaucratic challenges they have faced
Google have oversupply of brilliant ML researchers. What they need is a engineer that sees the applications of the technology so it can be turned into a product. Someone that can bridge the gap between the R&D team and the Bureaucracy.
Want an idea for a stupid product - input - description of a girl, hobbies, some minor flaws - output - create a poem. Have been using Vicuna quite successfully for that purpose.
Can't emphasize more on how much rigorous engineering practice could accelerate research delivery. It is THE key to have a productive research oriented team.
Good research engineers are underrated, and very difficult to find.
He should stay a Fellow, in a "brilliant consultant" role.
Based on what? I've heard all the Chuck Norris type jokes, but what has Jeff Dean actually accomplished that is so legendary as a software developer (or as a leader) ?
Per his Google bio/CV his main claims to fame seem to have been work on large scale infrastructure projects such as BigTable, MapReduce, Protobuf and TensorFlow, which seem more like solid engineering accomplishments rather than the stuff of legend.
https://research.google/people/jeff/
Seems like he's perhaps being rewarded with the title of "Chief Scientist" rather than necessarily suited to it, but I guess that depends on what Sundar is expecting out of him.
If he wanted to change things for better (in other people's eyes), he would have done a long long time ago.
My gut says that this wouldn't change things one bit. If anything, it will be worse with this giant org.
If thousands of people aren't enough, 10,000 wouldn't help much
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/announcing-google-deepmind
It seems that DeepMind has now gone from what had appeared to be a blue sky research org to almost a product group, with Google Research now being the primary research group.
Jeff Dean's reputation has always been as an uber-engineer, not any kind of visionary or great leader, so it's not obvious how well suited he's going to be to this somewhat odd role of Chief Scientist both to Google DeepMind and Google Research.
How things have changed since OpenAI was founded on the fear that Google was becoming an unbeatable powerhouse in AI!
Rushing it out the door in a space race model is probably not a good idea. At this point, the value proposition is moot.
As a client and even paying customer of google I don't want this AI intruded into my product experiences without a big fat OFF switch. Not because of some terminator skynet fantasy: I want an opportunity to discriminate between reality as projected from pagerank and classic NLP algorithms, from the synthetic responses from a model.
Having been in both places (Brain and DM), this feels so far from what I experienced that I must ask, what are you basing this on?
I read that to mean the party is over, we are treating that as a strategic subject and are streamlining our organisation. As you rightfully pointed Google basically had two competing organisations with all the complexity associated with that. That’s now over. From now on, there is only one captain steering the ship.
This probably sent a bad message with consequences for the whole public research field.
Before Facebook, the web was more open, with websites being more accessible to each other. Google scraped resources like Wikipedia and Twitter, and augmented the results into their search page.
When Facebook appeared, Google tried to integrate Facebook data into their search page. But Facebook, then an up-and-coming internet company, wanted to protect their data as a competitive moat. With this seeming to set an example, each platform started to hoard their data on their website. The web no longer interoperated with their data, and all data began to be siloed in their own platforms.
Can any HN Googlers comment on what this announcement means? Is this announcement just a PR move to get people to pay attention to upcoming announcements? Or does it actually have deeper impact to the way Google functions with internal teams?
Jeff Dean gave himself a promotion and doesn't want to run an org any more; aside from that, :shrug:?
In some sense, it's PR, but not in the typical gimmicky way. Alphabet has had DeepMind for a while, and at this point with all of the competition in AI, it doesn't make sense to keep DeepMind at arm's length. I personally think it's a good move and gives me more confidence, but it doesn't affect me directly. I do worry what redundancies this causes with Brain and Research though.
Their open positions mysteriously disappeared on November last year and they are still closed outside of specific senior roles and a very open ended "register your interest if you have a PhD".
Big loss for DeepMind if the separate pipeline is lost. Being able to hire for their priorities instead of whatever Google's hiring for is one of the reasons it was so successful.
Do you know if there's a list of such companies floating around? Really curious to see where the research talent in the space is heading, especially if they're leaving the warm embrace of their BigCo...
I can read between the lines that Google is done having Deepmind floating out there independently creating foundational research and not products. Sounds like this is a sign that they've internally recognized they are behind and need all their resources pulling in the same directions towards responding to the OpenAI/Microsoft threat.
It also seems to signal that they won't have their answer to Bing in the short term. As they say, nine women can't make a baby in a month and adding people to a late project makes it later.
The shift to commercialization (by companies) was inevitable. It's also a bit sad though. Somebody still has to do the fundamental stuff, and Google (along with Facebook) have been amazing for the ecosystem, especially open source. If everyone is going the OpenAI route, the golden age of AI is going be be over as we to the profit extraction phase
Well it was at least a decade away.
With the reports that Samsung may switch to Bing, you could quickly see an exodus in users over to chat search. It wouldn't take much lost revenue to implode Google's business model and the business model of every ad-supported site on the internet.
"Just publishing paper" is such an ignorant and dismissive attitude to one of the most significant contributors to AI development in the world. Without Google research and publication, OpenAI would not have the foundation to build its GPT to the current level.
1) DeepMind was given very significant autonomy since day 1 it was acquired. I find it very hard to believe that any attempt to take that away won't result in huge internal problems and / or attrition
2) Sundar Pichai has been coming in for a lot of criticism in general because he seems to be constantly out-maneuvered by Microsoft and we have seen very little new emerge from Google under his watch. Putting himself at the helm of this is going to really accentuate this and actually seems high risk - if he is the the reason Google is struggling to deliver elsewhere then positioning himself at the apex of an existentially important effort could be lethal.
Added together, there seems like a high risk this could go catastrophically wrong for Google, and Pichai in particular. Maybe it will work, but the downside is enormous.
"constantly" is a reach.
Google's screwed because LLMs offer us a fundamentally different business model for search, and I'm not convinced though that you can actually make a company out of LLMs that is as wildly profitable as Google was during its hayday. If that's true, then I just don't see how any CEO could go to the shareholders and say: "in order for us to survive, we have to accept that we're going to be a much smaller company in 5 years, both in terms of head count and profit." Sundar would be overthrown in a matter of days.
Now lets get on with accelerating the real AI race to zero and the big fight against O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com, X.AI and the other stragglers.
Stay very tuned to this.
Aka grifters. Those are the new DEI consultants.
I use Trax is my NLP class, so I hope it gets more adoption.
I'm not an AI Doomer, but is there some kind of scenario where the coming of AGI doesn't trigger a communist revolution and a lot of death and destruction along the way? I dunno, maybe it could be a Fabian revolution, but seems pretty unlikely. Seems more like AGI → everyone is pissed off that they still have to work for a living → a lot of rich people with heads on pikes. Is there some other scenario that's more likely? Doesn't feel that way to me. Then again, I'm the creator of https://bellriots.netlify.app/, so maybe I'm a Revolution Doomer.
Asking for a friend.
Your friend needs an introduction
Google isn't the leader anymore.
-_____-
> When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality.
Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI saw back in 2015".
> Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history.
Translation: "Now we live in a time in which AI research and technology has advanced exponentially thanks to the great achievements by our competitors – and we clearly feel left behind."
How is it different from Google's structure of having reviewing committees over everything? I hope that this is not yet another layer of gatekeepers. In a large enough organization, the high-level leads have such fragmented attention and such ingrained tendency towards avoiding political mistakes that they mainly contribute concerns instead of ideas, especially product ideas. As a result, they become gatekeepers and projects slow down. The larger an oversight committee is, the more concerns a project will receive, and the more mediocre the project will be because the team will focus on making the committee happy instead of making hard trade-offs with fast iterations. Of course, the Scientific Board consists of people way over my caliber, so they may well do a fantastic job for Google.
In reality, this is just Sundar looking through the org chart and saying: wow, these things seem related. Let's combine them because surely that will mean that it starts working. Just so that he can announce "something" as a growing army of sharks are snapping at his feet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA
Considering some of the other comments about merging two AI departments together (DeepMind and Brain) and injecting more bureaucracy into DeepMind, it seems to have some parallels with the story of the RCA CED. You can't just let researchers do research. There needs to be a clear goal/priority that this research can eventually be converted into a profitable product or service. Otherwise, the researchers will continue to work on "cool projects" and publishing papers with their name on them, with little consideration given to how to monetize this research.
Personally, I'm not a fan of this AI gold rush trying to inject AI into everything. It's just interesting to ponder.
As we are now seeing before our eyes, Google has aged. Big tech cushy culture does no longer creates an environment that yields innovation.
The MSFT move was probably brilliant most for this reason. They saw the writing on the wall. ChatGPT would never have been invented at any big tech co.
Goog investment in anthropic is just taking msft sloppy seconds and kind of copy cat play. Who knows maybe anthropic will make a happy mistake and create something surprising.
You are likely reading the result of a lot of corporate reorg that was a big political battle and the victors are now patting themselves on the back.
That said, reorg can be good to refocus the company, but you’re bleeding out massively while the infection spreads, putting a little bandaid is no reason to celebrate.
Anyways wish them the best of luck. As a kid it was always one of those companies we all dreamed to work for. Now it is like an aged grandparent who needs a cane to walk and encouragement when they are able to walk by themselves.
Feels a bit like China absorbing Hong Kong.
Which..... of course he did. They don't make any money. That's ultimately how these decisions are made.
I talked to one of their in-house recruiters (or HR or whatever) some 5-6(?) years ago. I asked them how they make money, they gave me a really muddled answer. It had the word "clients" in there. I didn't understand, so I tried to clarify, I said "oh, you make revenue from consulting for your clients?". Then they gave me a crystal clear answer, they said: "No, we're a lab". I noped outta there really fast.
In retrospect, I was right that I wouldn't have made any money, but might've been a good boost for my CV to do for a couple of years.
What both Google research and product missed, and ChatGPT provided almost accidentally, is that people need a way to answer ill-formed questions, and iteratively refine those questions. (The results are hit-or-miss, but far better than traditional search.)
What both OpenAI, Bing, and now Google realize, is that the race is not to a bigger model but to capturing the feedback loop of users querying your model so you can learn how to better understand their queries. If Microsoft gets all that traffic, Google never even gets the opportunity to catch up.
If Google were really smart, they would take another step: to break the mold of harvesting free users and instead pay representative users to interact with their stuff, in order to catch up. Just the process of operationalizing the notion of "representative" will vastly improve both product and research, and it would build goodwill in communities everywhere - goodwill they'll need to remain the default.
Progressive queries are just the leading edge of entire worlds of behavior that are yet ill-fitted to computers, but could be accommodated via AI. And if your engineers consider the problem as "fuzzy" search or "prompt engineering" or realism, you need to get people with more empathy, a minimal understanding of phenomenology, and enough experience with multiple cultures and discourses to be able to relate and translate
> DeepMind and Google Research's Brain team are merging to form a new unit called Google DeepMind, which will combine their talents and resources to accelerate progress towards building ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly. This will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs and AI products across Google and Alphabet, while transforming industries, advancing science, and serving diverse communities. The new unit will be led by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, with Eli Collins joining the leads team as VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani joining the research leadership team reporting to Koray Kavukcuoglu. A new Scientific Board for Google DeepMind will also be created to oversee research progress and direction.
From reading these comments, it looks like this is at best mitigating some internal conflict.
...which is that we're not looking at enough ads.
Google took over the world as something like the 11th search engine to hit the market, but some of their benchmarks were 10x better.
OpenAI has both going for them right now and I don't think that's going to change.
Releases like this are more about stock price and investment than anything else.
I’m glad we’ve put more investment into this area as ultimately AGI will be able to uplift a large sector of the population that historically went underserved, or at least level the playing field.
But statements like this are meaningless wank.
1. All fundamental AI research now falls under Demis. So basically what was Brain is now Deep Brain. 2. Jeff will lead the product build out of a multi-modal AI (LLM). 3. Google research under James will continue with everything else not directly AI related.
This is like the imagen announcement. Still can't use it.
I'm not seeing any AI here.
Yet when OpenAI "announces" things, we all have a new toy immediately. OpenAI is Apple, Google is just a PR firm at this point.
Only took something that can potentially take out Google (GPT4) to make it happen.
How times changes or is it true that nothing good lasts long?
G bought out DeepMind a long time ago. I wonder what they offered C-level execs this time around.
Other than the addition of the word "Google" - which could simply be a rebranding exercise - I am yet to see any evidence in support of that.
P.S. In particular, there haven't been any indications that Demis's reporting line is changing.
• DeepMind and Google Research's Brain team merging into single unit: Google DeepMind
• Goal: accelerate progress in AI and AGI development safely and responsibly
• Demis Hassabis leading the new unit
• Close collaboration with Google Product Areas
• Aim: improve lives of billions, transform industries, advance science, serve diverse communities
• Greater speed, collaboration, and execution needed for biggest impact
• Combining world-class AI talent with resources and infrastructure
• DeepMind and Brain teams' research laid foundations for current AI industry
• New Scientific Board for Google DeepMind overseeing research progress and direction
• Upcoming town hall meeting for further information and claritySounds like a PR move.
This would be enough as an anouncement, rest of it is just sugar coating.