Earlier today, we announced some changes that will accelerate our progress in AI and help us develop better AI systems, safely and responsibly. Below is a recap of what DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shared with employees:
Hello team
When we launched DeepMind in 2010, many people thought general AI was far-fetched science fiction technology and would take decades to become a reality.
Today we live in an era where AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the years to come, AI – and ultimately AGI – have the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history.
This is why today Sundar announces that DeepMind and the Brain team at Google Research will join forces to form a single, focused unit called Google DeepMind. The combination of our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress toward a world in which AI helps solve the greatest challenges facing humanity, and I am incredibly excited to lead this unit and work with all of you to build it. Together, working closely with our fantastic colleagues across Google product areas, we have a real opportunity to deliver AI research and products that dramatically improve the lives of billions of people, transform industries, advance science and serve diverse communities.
By creating Google DeepMind, I believe we can reach this future faster. Building ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly, requires that we solve some of the toughest scientific and engineering challenges of our time. To do this, we need to work faster, strengthen collaboration and execution, and simplify how we make decisions to focus on achieving the greatest impact.
Through Google DeepMind, we bring together our world-class AI talent with the computing power, infrastructure and resources to create the next generation of AI advancements and products at Google and Alphabet. , in a bold and responsible manner. The research advances from the phenomenal Brain and DeepMind teams have laid much of the foundation for today's AI industry, from deep reinforcement learning to transformers, and the work we will do now as part of this new combined unit will create the next wave. breakthroughs that change the world.
Sundar, Jeff Dean, James Manyika and I have built a fantastic partnership as we have worked to coordinate our efforts over the past few months. I look forward to working closely with Eli Collins, who will join my leadership team as VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani who will join the research leadership team reporting to Koray Kavukcuoglu. We are also creating a new scientific council for Google DeepMind to oversee research progress and direction of the unit, which will be led by Koray and include representatives from all organizations. Jeff, Koray, Zoubin, Shane and I will finalize the composition of this board together in the coming days.
I'm sure you'll have a lot of questions about what this new unity will look like for you, your teams, and all of us, and we'll work hard to bring clarity to everyone as quickly as possible. Please read Sundar's note and tune in to tomorrow's public meeting.
I'm excited to be on this trip with you and can't wait to see everyone soon.
Best
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