Google consolidating teams across Research, Google DeepMind

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post a number of structural changes to improve velocity and execution across the company. Pichai said in part: “Last year we created Google DeepMind, bringing together the Google Brain team, DeepMind, and other researchers specifically focused on creating increasingly capable and general AI systems… To accelerate this progress, we’re going to consolidate the teams that focus on building models across Research and Google DeepMind. All of this work will now sit in Google DeepMind and scale our capacity to deliver capable AI for our users, partners and customers. This will simplify development by concentrating compute-intensive model building in one place and establishing single access points for PAs looking to take these models and build generative AI applications. This change also gives Google Research a clear and distinct mandate to continue investing in foundational and applied computer science research in three key areas that tie directly to Google’s mission: computing systems – including quantum, foundational ML and algorithms, and applied science and society. Fundamental computer science research is in our DNA and we have some of the world’s best computer scientists. We simply would not be the company we are today without the researchers who developed the foundations on which all Google’s products are built and are now inventing the foundations for our future. We’re moving Responsible AI teams in Research to Google DeepMind, to be closer to where the models are built and scaled. We’ve recently moved other responsibility teams into our central Trust and Safety team, where we are investing more in AI testing and evals… We are formalizing the collaboration between DSPA and P&E and bringing the teams together in a new PA called Platforms & Devices. And the Google Research teams focused on computational photography and on-device intelligence will also be moving over to join the new org to bring deep AI expertise across platforms and devices.”