Google has merged its DeepMind subsidiary with Google Research's Brain division as 'Google DeepMind.'

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that "combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI."

DeepMind co-founder and head Demis Hassabis has been named as CEO of the new entity, while Brain's co-founder Jeff Dean will become chief scientist for both Google Research and Google DeepMind.

"Building ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly, demands that we solve some of the hardest scientific and engineering challenges of our time," Hassabis said. "For that, we need to work with greater speed, stronger collaboration and execution, and to simplify the way we make decisions to focus on achieving the biggest impact."

The two teams were previously seen as rivals, and competed for attention and resources. DeepMind was usually more focused on long-term research, while Brain had a higher priority of commercializing its work.

In 2021, Google rejected a pitch from DeepMind’s founders to give it the same legal structure as a nonprofit and has increasingly pushed for the team to release more products.

"The research advances from the phenomenal Brain and DeepMind teams laid much of the foundations of the current AI industry, from Deep Reinforcement Learning to Transformers, and the work we are going to be doing now as part of this new combined unit will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs," Hassabis said.

But while the two teams have indeed developed much of the technology that made the generative AI boom of today possible, Google was caught off guard by the growth of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's rapid integration into its products.

We spoke to both Google and Microsoft, as well as AWS, Nvidia, Digital Realty, Midjourney, and others about the impact of generative AI on supercomputers, cloud, and compute. Read for free today.