Great minds in tech come together to solve hard problems – such as, why did anyone think Bard was a good name?
Google Brain and DeepMind are merging to form a new unit named, predictably enough, Google DeepMind to accelerate the development of general AI, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai argued on Thursday.
Pichai claimed Google has been an « AI-first company » since 2016. As neural networks rapidly progressed, he said, the biz has integrated machine learning capabilities to revamp existing software products like Search and Gmail, while adding it to hardware like its Pixel smartphones.
The corporation has also cultivated a strong internal AI research team with Brain, he said, but it was time to make some changes. Google Brain is well-known for developing the popular transformer architecture currently powering large AI systems around the world, the TensorFlow machine learning software library, and novel techniques to train and scale large language models.
The sorts of things Microsoft, OpenAI, and their ilk are championing like mad at the moment, which must be a bit awkward and frustrating for Googlers.
« The pace of progress is now faster than ever before. 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, » Pichai said in a canned statement.
