Google DeepMindCopied

On 20 April 2023 Alphabet announced that DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research would join forces as a single, focused unit called Google DeepMind. CNBC described it as a move to bring two groups focused on artificial intelligence closer together as the battle for AI heated up.

In a note to employees published by the company, DeepMind's chief executive, who would lead the new unit, recalled that when DeepMind launched in 2010 many people considered general AI far-fetched science fiction. He argued that AI research was now advancing exponentially and that combining the teams would accelerate progress, with Google's computing power, infrastructure and resources behind the next generation of breakthroughs and products.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google and Alphabet, set out the structure in a post on Google's blog. Google had been an AI-first company since 2016, and the combined teams' record spanned AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold and TensorFlow. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's chief executive, would run Google DeepMind and lead the development of Google's most capable general AI systems, while Jeff Dean, who co-founded the Brain team, became Google's chief scientist reporting to Pichai, starting with a series of powerful multimodal models. The Verge added context: Alphabet had acquired DeepMind in 2014, the two had butted heads before, and DeepMind had reportedly lost a long bid for more independence in 2021. The merger came weeks after Google opened early access to Bard, its answer to ChatGPT.

The note also emphasised speed and simplicity: building more capable AI safely demanded greater speed, stronger collaboration and simpler decision-making. It credited the two teams with foundations of the modern AI industry, from deep reinforcement learning to Transformers, and announced a new scientific board to oversee research direction.

The name is the story here. DeepMind had its own name and reputation as a research lab. Putting Google in front of the name says the lab now serves the parent's products directly, at a moment when Alphabet needed to show it was not losing the AI race.

As branding it is blunt and effective. Google DeepMind sounds like a product organisation, not an academic outpost, which is exactly the signal the merger was designed to send.