33 ms·

Google DeepMind

nwoli 3y ago
Sounds like a smart decision short term questionable long term (more focus on product instead of fundamental research).
- luma 3y ago
  Their existing “all research/no product” approach is becoming increasingly untenable. This had to happen if Google wants to remain a going concern.
  - nwoli 3y ago
    Transformers were fundamental research that ended up having huge side benefits. (Google has plenty of money to keep spending on fundamental research, especially focused on smart things like ML.)
    - dougmwne 3y ago
      Inventing transformers may prove to be Google's undoing. Being a research paper factory doesn't seem to be good for shareholders.
      - politician 3y ago
        Still, inventing XMLHttpRequest wasn't Microsoft's undoing, but for many years we suspected it might be. This might be a similar situation.
mebazaa 3y ago
For context: this is pretty surprising, given the significant amount of independence Deepmind had within Google. So much so, in fact, that they tried for a long time to be spun off from Google: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...
- cubefox 3y ago
  Yeah. DeepMind has sought more independence than they had, but now they have lost it completely. It seems there was an internal power struggle and Google won.
  - pneumonic 3y ago
    Sounds like some key people will be leaving "Google Deepmind" in the next few months.
    - dmix 3y ago
      The people who want to do R&D disconnected from product dev should be leaving Google Deepmind. There's still a valuable role for them elsewhere and there will always been money to fund them. Doesn't mean that Google will suddenly be at a disadvantage as a result though.
- mFixman 3y ago
  One of the biggest liberties DeepMind had was a completely separate hiring process and pipeline than Google. Their open positions mysteriously disappeared on November last year and they are still closed outside of specific senior roles and a very open ended "register your interest if you have a PhD". Big loss for DeepMind if the separate pipeline is lost. Being able to hire for their priorities instead of whatever Google's hiring for is one of the reasons it was so successful.
bgirard 3y ago
> When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality. Well it was at least a decade away.
- skilled 3y ago
  I apologize for the confusion.
  - ukuina 3y ago
    This is an underrated comment that cuts sharp.
deleted 3y ago
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rvz 3y ago
About time and finally for some very serious competition against O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com but unsurprising that DeepMind would be directly involved [0] and merged with Brain. Now lets get on with accelerating the real AI race to zero and the big fight against O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com, X.AI and the other stragglers. Stay very tuned to this. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508997
- open592 3y ago
  Funnily your comment made me wonder who owns "ai.com" - So I tried it out, and got redirected to "https://chat.openai.com/ https://chat.openai.com/".
  - SXX 3y ago
    I guess we can just call them that without "open" part.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    ai.com's domain registration doesn't seem to be owned by OpenAI. And, ironically, ai.com's registrar (not registrant) is Google LLC. https://whois.domaintools.com/openai.com https://whois.domaintools.com/openai.com https://whois.domaintools.com/ai.com https://whois.domaintools.com/ai.com
    - endorphine 3y ago
      They're probably renting it from the original owner.
robbiemitchell 3y ago
How does this fit in with Bard? I see no mention of Jack Krawczyk here, who is listed as its product lead.
- dormento 3y ago
  I think they'll google-news the name "Bard" due to bad reception caused by unrealistic expectations (and a market primed by vastly superior alternatives).
  - ukuina 3y ago
    Absolutely. They would never go to market with a name like Bard. The name would need to be focus grouped and optimized to no end before reveal.
SeanAnderson 3y ago
A couple of thoughts: - This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step to mitigating those fears. - Google has currently given ~300M to Anthropic and has a partnership with them. I assume Google continues to see potential in both avenues and won't neglect one AI team for the other. I'm guessing that DeepMind will be their primary focus because of the numerous, real-world applications already at play. - It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. They seem to be very different approaches. Yet, they both have support for language and imagery. So, perhaps they aren't that different afterall? - Still waiting to hear more from Google on how they plan to leverage their novel PaLM architecture. The API for it was released a month ago, but, to my awareness, has yet to take the world by storm. (Q: Bard isn't powered by PaLM, right?) Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area. I trust DeepMind's team and I trust Google's research teams, but Google's ability to execute and take products to market has been quite weak thus far. My gut says this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy.
- Xeoncross 3y ago
  Yeah, the message seems be "Wait, we're still here! Don't forget about us and we promise we'll catch up!" > Announcing Google DeepMind... launched DeepMind back in 2010 ...
- notatoad 3y ago
  >pushing resources into DeepMind is this a influx of resources, or consolidation and cutbacks? i read it as google used to have two different ai research teams, and now they have one fewer than they used to. they've shut down at least one deepmind office recently: https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmonton-site-as-part-of-google-layoffs/ https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmon...
- GreedClarifies 3y ago
  "this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy." I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google. Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research paper game and into the product game. Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward. Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment between the company's goals and those of the employees. Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine, but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't that wealthy.
simple10 3y ago
> I’m sure you will have lots of questions about what this new unit will look like for you. Can any HN Googlers comment on what this announcement means? Is this announcement just a PR move to get people to pay attention to upcoming announcements? Or does it actually have deeper impact to the way Google functions with internal teams?
- ipnon 3y ago
  DeepMind is going to stop making models to do MineCraft speedruns, and instead start making models to improve search results and ad click through rates.
  - simple10 3y ago
    Lol. Makes sense. Any idea why they're queuing this up for a multiple announcement PR stunt? Seems a bit out of character for Google to tease out announcements like this. My guess is they have a bigger announcement coming next week. Otherwise, it seems like a bad PR move... it positions Google as playing catchup in AI... which is accurate, but strange PR.
    - dougmwne 3y ago
      PR blitz because it's going to look good to investors. Google is killing the vanity projects and moonshots and rolling those resources into teams that aim to launch products in the next 6-12 months.
  - okdood64 3y ago
    Bingo. This feels like Google is _trying to get serious_ about leveraging DeepMind to create better products right now (and generate more revenue) instead of: "Look at this robot play soccer. Cool, huh?"
- QuercusMax 3y ago
  I'm a Googler in the Research PA (Health AI), and as far as I can tell this will have ~0 impact on my life. Jeff Dean gave himself a promotion and doesn't want to run an org any more; aside from that, :shrug:?
xyst 3y ago
ChatGPT changed the game. Big G getting scared of falling behind. G bought out DeepMind a long time ago. I wonder what they offered C-level execs this time around.
deleted 3y ago
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rollinDyno 3y ago
When was the last time Google was proactive rather than reactive? It feels that this is the same for all big Tech firms except for Microsoft.
- darth_aardvark 3y ago
  The Metaverse is (was?) definitely proactive.
  - ulfw 3y ago
    What metaverse does Google proactively pursue?
    - pb7 3y ago
      >It feels that this is the same for all big Tech firms except for Microsoft. Meta is a big tech firm.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- gojomo 3y ago
  Thy've been proactive in deleting chat logs that they were ordered by courts to keep for pending litigation.
Abecid 3y ago
Looks like DeepMind will no longer be able to pursue academic research with the pressure to monetize. Talent exodus could happen similar to what happened at Google AI where many prominent researchers either went to OpenAI or started their own companies
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Agreed. I'm seeing multiple other comments here suggesting DeepMind was somehow a waste when they have done a lot of very impressive research. "Solving" protein folding. Retrieval transformers. Novel solutions to math problems using ML? What about beating fucking Lee Sedol in go? No? None of that matters? C'mon.
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    Those are towering achievements that don't add to Google as a business. It was an important part of Google's reputation, but now that reputation is in the mud as Microsoft and OpenAI become king in the eyes of the public.
  - perryizgr8 3y ago
    Arguably none of that made a comparable difference to the life of a common man as ChatGPT did. It's necessary to do fundamental research, but imperative to maintain focus on delivering real world value to real world people.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  > started their own companies Do you know if there's a list of such companies floating around? Really curious to see where the research talent in the space is heading, especially if they're leaving the warm embrace of their BigCo...
macns 3y ago
.. Sundar is announcing that DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research will be joining forces as a single, focused unit called Google DeepMind This would be enough as an anouncement, rest of it is just sugar coating.
ur-whale 3y ago
About fucking time someone cracked the whip and get the money sinkhole that is deepmind to producing something that contributes to the bottom line. Only took something that can potentially take out Google (GPT4) to make it happen.
dougmwne 3y ago
While ultimately I think this is probably a very good organizational change, to have similar teams working on similar projects under the same leadership, it does seem to spell trouble in the short term. I can read between the lines that Google is done having Deepmind floating out there independently creating foundational research and not products. Sounds like this is a sign that they've internally recognized they are behind and need all their resources pulling in the same directions towards responding to the OpenAI/Microsoft threat. It also seems to signal that they won't have their answer to Bing in the short term. As they say, nine women can't make a baby in a month and adding people to a late project makes it later.
- version_five 3y ago
  This sounds about right. I think it's acknowledged that OpenAI's strength has been product rather than just pure research - google and facebook both have way more publications and deeper benches, but aren't really commercializing anything. The shift to commercialization (by companies) was inevitable. It's also a bit sad though. Somebody still has to do the fundamental stuff, and Google (along with Facebook) have been amazing for the ecosystem, especially open source. If everyone is going the OpenAI route, the golden age of AI is going be be over as we to the profit extraction phase
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    I see your point, though I think it's ultimately going to be good for AI progress. So far the research has been mostly a vanity project for these companies. Who knew if there was really any gold at the end of those rainbows. Eventually the appetite for participating in the research paper olympics was going to run out, probably right at the same time that monetary policy stayed tight for too long. The possibility of building a trillion dollar company on this tech means a whole lot more investment, more people entering the field. More people excited to tinker in their spare time and more practical knowledge gained. More GPUs in more data centers. Eventually things will loop back around to pure research with that many more resources applied. It sure beats an AI winter, which probably would have been the alternative had LLMs not taken off.
  - deleted 3y ago
Etheryte 3y ago
So statistically [0], expect this product to be shut down in 2027? [0] https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/ https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/
- QuercusMax 3y ago
  It's not a product, it's a research organization.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    Department of Research Simulation
chevy90 3y ago
Cant believe when i heard this news of google lacking ai development despite being front runner in tech for too long and with all that talent under the hood. How times changes or is it true that nothing good lasts long?
divyekapoor 3y ago
"Sundar is announcing"... not "we are announcing"... speaks volumes as to the fact that this was a unilateral decision.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Hah! Good catch. I doubt that was unintentional. Demis doesn't sound too pleased about having his merry band of misfits sucked into the mothership.
- gsatic 3y ago
  Obviously. Who wants to work on adtech? Only ppl without a choice or a clue.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
This is what panic looks like.
- ulfw 3y ago
  Same as the Google Plus days under wonderful Vic Gundotra.
whywhywhydude 3y ago
Exciting time for AI. A little competition from OpenAI is finally forcing google AI researchers to actually focus on real world applications instead of just publishing papers and patting themselves on the back.
- galaxytachyon 3y ago
  What do you mean? The attention based transformer architecture was created by Google. AlphaFold took the biotech world by storm. Tensorflow is significant platform for AI developers. Chinchilla pioneered new method to improve LLM. "Just publishing paper" is such an ignorant and dismissive attitude to one of the most significant contributors to AI development in the world. Without Google research and publication, OpenAI would not have the foundation to build its GPT to the current level.
  - mrbungie 3y ago
    The whole point is that all the progress you mention is worth peanuts to Google's shareholders. Hence this decision and blog post about it. If anything it allowed competitors to raise above Google. PS: Not saying Deepmind's research is not worthy, nor that this is fair. Just that it appears that Alphabet/Google (and by extension Deepmind) is being reminded that its main goal is making money.
    - pb7 3y ago
      Ah, classic damned if you, damned if you don't. Search is being ruined by the pursuit of maximizing ad revenue but AI research is being wasted because it's not used in pursuit of maximizing revenue. Can't really win, huh? There should be nothing but gratitude that Google uses its ad revenue to pay for research that greatly benefits everyone.
      - mrbungie 3y ago
        I'm not judging. I'm grateful of Alphabet/Google and that its research is being extremely useful in AI/ML, just saying shareholders may not think that way.
Imnimo 3y ago
It wasn't very long ago that we were reading articles saying that Deepmind wanted more independence from Google (https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...). Feels a bit like China absorbing Hong Kong.
SilverBirch 3y ago
I feel like this is a bad sign. What this announcement reads like is "Hey! I won this internal political struggle!". Ok, sure, not sure why anyone outside the company should take this as good news. This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape goat for missing AI. Remember - what this announcement means is that Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure. Trying to synthesize those two separate teams (half of which wanted you to fail) into one productive and world-leading team is a hell of an ask.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Yeah, absolutely lining him up to be the scapegoat. His chance for success seems severely compromised and his mission was always to invent AGI, not create some kind of lowly ad-search product. The party sounds over for him and I bet he will be out and off to the next research think-tank soon.
- hervature 3y ago
  My outsider perspective is that DeepMind was the research arm and Brain was specifically tasked with making the company money through AI/ML applications. This appears to me that Google is combining the two to make sure that DeepMind starts turning a profit by adopting Brain's mission. Of course, DeepMind's brand is orders of magnitude more valuable so it makes sense to keep the name around. Would be happy to hear more knowledgeable takes on if this is an incorrect reading of the tea leaves.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Will we ever live in a world where people once again use first-person pronouns?
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      I asked GPT-4 to do it and it scattered first-person pronouns everywhere. https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 Happy now?
rvba 3y ago
Reorganizing two teams that did their own thing will not reap immediate benefits. It will take time. Sounds like a PR move.
pcj-github 3y ago
Will Google stop sharing progress in foundational AI research to it's competitors now?
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Why? The foundational research papers have all come from Google Brain/Google Research and not from DeepMind.
  - mirker 3y ago
    Many of those people left though.
ugh123 3y ago
I'm curious what this will mean for DeepMind's work in medical and bioscience applications vs. now what may be more aligned with Google products and Anthropic which seem to be prioritizing commercializing consumer applications over science.
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  There's always Isomorphic Labs.
gojomo 3y ago
Sure, a reorg'll fix things.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  Refactoring for directors.
mnd999 3y ago
Expecting all their products to get cancelled in ~6months.
rhyme-boss 3y ago
Accelerating AI development and improving safety are inherently contradictory. It's pretty annoying and disingenuous when someone says "this move will speed us up and make us safer".
seydor 3y ago
Google Mind or Deep Brain?
rasengan 3y ago
Google, did you really just copy OpenAI's website layout [1]? Google isn't the leader anymore. -_____- [1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
- okdood64 3y ago
  Seems like a pretty cookie cutter start-up style website in 2023...
sva_ 3y ago
I'm worried that OpenAI has started a trend of these AI companies being a lot more secretive about their research in the future. I mean basically OpenAI took Deepmind's/Google's public research on transformers and ran with it, not publishing back the results of improving it. This probably sent a bad message with consequences for the whole public research field.
- neel8986 3y ago
  I agree with this. Last decade was golden age of AI where all major players including Google brain, deepmind, FAIR, Microsoft Research contributed a lot. To honest OpenAI had the least intellectual contribution of them all except of few marketing material masquerading as papers. From now on we can expect all labs to secretive and not publish anything. This is really bad considering all this models are black box and research is needed to understand them better. Hope government comes into picture and forces this labs to explain details of each model
  - tempusalaria 3y ago
    FAIR will continue to publish. Nvidia and Uber also. Then you have open source oriented labs who should continue publishing. Google is the big one. They have made more research contributions than all other labs combined basically.
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
      I'm not that plugged-in to the AI world (though doing my best to catch up)... but is Uber really viewed as a powerhouse on the same level as FAIR?
      - singhrac 3y ago
        No, not really. It was never really as large, and most of their output was in probabilistic programming (e.g. Pyro) and work that was relevant to self-driving cars (point cloud compression, etc.). But they shut down Uber AI in the layoffs last year.
xg15 3y ago
I guess Google is dancing alright.
aix1 3y ago
A lot of folks here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that this means that DeepMind is losing its independence. Other than the addition of the word "Google" - which could simply be a rebranding exercise - I am yet to see any evidence in support of that. P.S. In particular, there haven't been any indications that Demis's reporting line is changing.
tgtweak 3y ago
I remain confident that it is impossible for a "startup" or properly competitive standalone org to exist under the roof of Google. From reading these comments, it looks like this is at best mitigating some internal conflict.
paxys 3y ago
I have commented this many times on such articles, and will say it again: Google still thinks of AI as a research project, or at best a way to produce better search results. They essentially created the entire current generation of the AI space and then... gave it away, because no one on the product side understood what they had actually built. Handing the reins to the DeepMind team – who have never launched a single product in their history – seems to be a doubling down on that same failed strategy. Google doesn't need more smart AI researchers, academics or ethicists. They need product managers who understand the underlying technology and can commercialize it. They need pragmatic engineers who can execute, launch and maintain services. That has always been their problem as a company.
- lallysingh 3y ago
  They're the new Xerox, looking at PARC's output and asking, "How will this make our copiers better?" Internally, everyone's asking "How will this help my promo packet?"
  - wmeredith 3y ago
    Absolutely. You could also sub in Microsoft, looking at the internet in 2002 and asking, "how could this make Windows desktop better"?
    - crop_rotation 3y ago
      IE was already dominant by 2002. Microsoft didn't ignore the Internet. They went hell bent on it during Gates era and won decisevely. It's only when they had no competition IE got stuck and then surpassed.
      - paxys 3y ago
        If talking about bundling a web browser inside their OS, sure. It was more that Microsoft missed the entire potential of the internet as a whole and how fundamentally transformational it could be. They had no presence in online services, e-commerce, search and more until they saw competitors eating their lunch, and have been lagging behind ever since.
vessenes 3y ago
Sundar's email mentions something critical - Jeff Dean is going to be the Chief Scientist in DeepMind, and coordinate back to Sundar. This is a big deal; that move tells you that Google is taking being behind on public-facing AI seriously, Dean is an incredibly valuable, incredibly scarce resource. If we wind way back to Google Docs, Gmail and Android strategy, they took market share from leaders by giving away high quality products. If I were in charge of strategy there, I would double down on the Stability / Facebook plan, and open source PaLM architecture Chinchilla-optimal foundation models stat. Then I'd build tooling to run and customize the models over GCP, so open + cloud. I'd probably start selling TPUv4 racks immediately as well. I don't believe they can win on a direct API business model this cycle. But, I think they could do a form of embrace and extend by going radically open and leveraging their research + deployment skills.
- neximo64 3y ago
  Jeff Dean is the reason OpenAI has beaten Google as it stands today. Not much weight in it being a good decision. He was too risk averse.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dougmwne 3y ago
  That sounds like a fairly brilliant counter to "Open"AI. Something tells me that Google is still too scared of this tech in the hands of the public to go there though.
  - owlglass 3y ago
    What indicates that Google is "too scared" as opposed to merely lagging behind?
    - dougmwne 3y ago
      Piles of previous statements talking about safety and a general unwillingness to put any of its models in the hands of anyone not under NDA. Bard is the first counterexample I can think of and that was forced by OpenAI.
w10-1 3y ago
Google politics and history aside, it's much better to link research with products for software. Unlike physics and biology, software is basically what we say it is, so there isn't a natural ordering to research (and it can wander forever, all too much like literary criticism). What both Google research and product missed, and ChatGPT provided almost accidentally, is that people need a way to answer ill-formed questions, and iteratively refine those questions. (The results are hit-or-miss, but far better than traditional search.) What both OpenAI, Bing, and now Google realize, is that the race is not to a bigger model but to capturing the feedback loop of users querying your model so you can learn how to better understand their queries. If Microsoft gets all that traffic, Google never even gets the opportunity to catch up. If Google were really smart, they would take another step: to break the mold of harvesting free users and instead pay representative users to interact with their stuff, in order to catch up. Just the process of operationalizing the notion of "representative" will vastly improve both product and research, and it would build goodwill in communities everywhere - goodwill they'll need to remain the default. Progressive queries are just the leading edge of entire worlds of behavior that are yet ill-fitted to computers, but could be accommodated via AI. And if your engineers consider the problem as "fuzzy" search or "prompt engineering" or realism, you need to get people with more empathy, a minimal understanding of phenomenology, and enough experience with multiple cultures and discourses to be able to relate and translate
galaxyquanta 3y ago
What does this mean for JAX (light-weight ML library from Google Brain) vs Tensorflow (from Deepmind)?
- johnmoberg 3y ago
  DeepMind already seem to be using JAX quite extensively: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/using-jax-to-accelerate-our-research https://www.deepmind.com/blog/using-jax-to-accelerate-our-re...
- tarvaina 3y ago
  Tensorflow is also from Google Brain, not DeepMind.
waselighis 3y ago
There's an interesting history behind the RCA CED (Capacitance Electronic Disk), an attempt to put video on vinyl. While the full history behind it's failure is complicated, a large factor was the differing priorities between research and other departments that delayed the product by several years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA Considering some of the other comments about merging two AI departments together (DeepMind and Brain) and injecting more bureaucracy into DeepMind, it seems to have some parallels with the story of the RCA CED. You can't just let researchers do research. There needs to be a clear goal/priority that this research can eventually be converted into a profitable product or service. Otherwise, the researchers will continue to work on "cool projects" and publishing papers with their name on them, with little consideration given to how to monetize this research. Personally, I'm not a fan of this AI gold rush trying to inject AI into everything. It's just interesting to ponder.
xnx 3y ago
I'm surprised to see so many comments in this thread criticizing Google for not milking more money out of their AI research sooner. Not being a shareholder, I'm pretty happy with how they catalyzed the modern AI revolution and have worked on very hard and meaningful problems like protein folding.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  People can be negative and critical for no reason. In this case, I think criticism is due because Google's failure to productize has lead them to a potential existential disaster. Most of their revenue depends on search and there being an ecosystem of websites to link to and display even more of their ads. Generative AI is an existential risk to their current search interface, the ability to insert ads into that experience and there even being any ad-supported websites with free content to link to. With the reports that Samsung may switch to Bing, you could quickly see an exodus in users over to chat search. It wouldn't take much lost revenue to implode Google's business model and the business model of every ad-supported site on the internet.
  - xnx 3y ago
    Fair. ChatGPT is definitely the most serious event in Google's long and utterly dominant history of web search. Samsung is definitely using ChatGPT as a negotiating tactic with Google. I assume that ad revenue share is part of the arrangement. There's no way that Bing Ads could match the amount that Google Ads pays out to Samsung. This whole space is moving excitingly fast, but it's still too early to claim that anyone has "won" the space. If I had to bet who had the most advanced and most used AI service 5 years from now, I would definitely bet on Google.
  - amf12 3y ago
    > Most of their revenue depends on search Ads actually, but via Search yes. > and there being an ecosystem of websites to link to and display even more of their ads. Regardless of the change in the interface, the websites aren't going anywhere. Maybe they'd be more tailored for LLMs to parse than humans. > Generative AI is an existential risk to their current search interface, I don't think so. It'd be easy to pivot to a different interface if it gains popularity after the initial hype. There are still a lot of monetizable queries that people use Search for, and won't use LLMs. > the ability to insert ads into that experience and there even being any ad-supported websites with free content to link to. It'd be easy to insert ads in LLM responses. I think LLMs will be a good thing for Google Ads. Right now, people hate ads on web because they are obnoxious and are competing for attention. Inserting ads in LLM responses will much less distracting and valuable. Ask Google Search chat which TV should I buy based on my criteria, and Google could suggest the top brands, and "ads" for where you could buy it. For example: "there is a promotion going on at your local BestBuy for this TV" or whatever. They have this info in the Shopping tab.
HopenHeyHi 3y ago
If Google were to go on a startup acquisition spree in this hot new competitive space in a further attempt to catch up - how would they locate and assess potential companies? Asking for a friend.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  They would buy someone they have started a relationship with already most likely. Your friend needs an introduction
deleted 3y ago
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m3kw9 3y ago
Google still researching lol
agnosticmantis 3y ago
I wonder if this change has any implications for the TensorFlow vs. JAX situation/transition. IIRC I read that DeepMind mainly used JAX, but not sure about the Brain. Any insights from the people in the know? It seems JAX is the future, but TF dominates current production stacks.
- arkano 3y ago
  Flax, a big neural network JAX library, is developed and used by Brain. TF will stay around for boilerplate / data-loading, but JAX support probably isn’t going anywhere.
alecco 3y ago
Musk recruiters for X.ai must be salivating.
turnsout 3y ago
Another Google AI announcement with no product in sight
alecco 3y ago
Microsoft was smart on letting OpenAI keep doing their thing. Pichai seems to have chosen to micromanage DeepMind. The board should find an actual CEO ASAP.
krn 3y ago
I am a big fan of Alphabet as a company, but this is how I read the first two paragraphs... > When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality. Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI saw back in 2015". > Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history. Translation: "Now we live in a time in which AI research and technology has advanced exponentially thanks to the great achievements by our competitors – and we clearly feel left behind."
- auggierose 3y ago
  Right. You know that DeepMind did AlphaGo, right? It made its entrance in 2015.
  - krn 3y ago
    And how does that compare with what OpenAI has accomplished since 2015? I'm not blaming DeepMind here. It was Google's job not to start loosing ground to Microsoft in the age of AI.
    - auggierose 3y ago
      Personally, I feel AlphaGo was the biggest deal ever. It put AI truly on the map. OpenAI is just a corollary to that, and would not exist without DeepMind in the first place.
      - krn 3y ago
        That's probably true, because OpenAI was formed just two months after AlphaGo defeated the European Go champion Fan Hui. But Google has missed a lot of opportunities since then, and is now trying to catch up.
      - nicetryguy 3y ago
earthboundkid 3y ago
> Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history. I'm not an AI Doomer, but is there some kind of scenario where the coming of AGI doesn't trigger a communist revolution and a lot of death and destruction along the way? I dunno, maybe it could be a Fabian revolution, but seems pretty unlikely. Seems more like AGI → everyone is pissed off that they still have to work for a living → a lot of rich people with heads on pikes. Is there some other scenario that's more likely? Doesn't feel that way to me. Then again, I'm the creator of https://bellriots.netlify.app/ https://bellriots.netlify.app/, so maybe I'm a Revolution Doomer.
- scottyah 3y ago
  It'll get a lot of people off the internet, and wreck the lives of those who stay addicted.
fudged71 3y ago
I hear there's office space they could use in Edmonton ;)
deleted 3y ago
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uptownfunk 3y ago
End of the day, the best product innovation has come from hungry passionate and capable founders with a solid mix of science, engineering and product. As we are now seeing before our eyes, Google has aged. Big tech cushy culture does no longer creates an environment that yields innovation. The MSFT move was probably brilliant most for this reason. They saw the writing on the wall. ChatGPT would never have been invented at any big tech co. Goog investment in anthropic is just taking msft sloppy seconds and kind of copy cat play. Who knows maybe anthropic will make a happy mistake and create something surprising. You are likely reading the result of a lot of corporate reorg that was a big political battle and the victors are now patting themselves on the back. That said, reorg can be good to refocus the company, but you’re bleeding out massively while the infection spreads, putting a little bandaid is no reason to celebrate. Anyways wish them the best of luck. As a kid it was always one of those companies we all dreamed to work for. Now it is like an aged grandparent who needs a cane to walk and encouragement when they are able to walk by themselves.
next_xibalba 3y ago
Competition is such a beautiful catalyst.
sdfghswe 3y ago
I hear that Demis had been fighting this for a while. I guess he lost. Which..... of course he did. They don't make any money. That's ultimately how these decisions are made. I talked to one of their in-house recruiters (or HR or whatever) some 5-6(?) years ago. I asked them how they make money, they gave me a really muddled answer. It had the word "clients" in there. I didn't understand, so I tried to clarify, I said "oh, you make revenue from consulting for your clients?". Then they gave me a crystal clear answer, they said: "No, we're a lab". I noped outta there really fast. In retrospect, I was right that I wouldn't have made any money, but might've been a good boost for my CV to do for a couple of years.
javier_e06 3y ago
[flagged]
omot 3y ago
From this blog post, I could already feel the bureaucratic nature of their org. My money's still on OpenAI. I think their motivation is more pure, their objectives more focused, and their org more simple. I usually think of product dominance in two vectors: first to market and benchmarks. Google took over the world as something like the 11th search engine to hit the market, but some of their benchmarks were 10x better. OpenAI has both going for them right now and I don't think that's going to change.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
OpenAI, Musk's whatever the name, Google Mind, the other dozen projects that spring up every single day. -- I just read Scott Alexanders Meditations on Moloch for the first time, and this mad rush to monetize AI seems to be right on track.
mason96 3y ago
[dead]
abraxas 3y ago
I wonder where this puts Geoff Hinton in this new hierarchy. He still works for Google, doesn't he?
neximo64 3y ago
This demonstrates to shareholders of Alphabet that Sundar is actually not a good CEO. The focus is not on the product or quality but organising resources. The resources are already the best at Google but led by a moron.
Takennickname 3y ago
Am I the only one who thinks this is Sundar screwing up big time? If there's only one AI team, and it fails, then you blame whoever is leading them. If there's multiple teams, and they all fail, there's only Sundar to blame.
frozenlettuce 3y ago
Does anyone else feels some sort of "corporate-speak-blindness" when reading these statements from Google? They are just informing that some orgs are being rearranged, but for some reason they had to make the text have super low information density.
theGnuMe 3y ago
My take: 1. All fundamental AI research now falls under Demis. So basically what was Brain is now Deep Brain. 2. Jeff will lead the product build out of a multi-modal AI (LLM). 3. Google research under James will continue with everything else not directly AI related.
dahwolf 3y ago
"Combining our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress towards a world in which AI helps solve the biggest challenges facing humanity" ...which is that we're not looking at enough ads.
woeirua 3y ago
This move makes sense from the perspective that DeepMind has some street cred in their ability to produce novel models that solve interesting problems. The only issue is that DeepMind has also suffered from the same problems that the mothership has: an inability to execute. Are there any documented success stories of DeepMind making serious money off their models? They've been great at producing interesting and valuable research, but all of their partnerships have failed as far as I know. Google's screwed because LLMs offer us a fundamentally different business model for search, and I'm not convinced though that you can actually make a company out of LLMs that is as wildly profitable as Google was during its hayday. If that's true, then I just don't see how any CEO could go to the shareholders and say: "in order for us to survive, we have to accept that we're going to be a much smaller company in 5 years, both in terms of head count and profit." Sundar would be overthrown in a matter of days.
- rcme 3y ago
  Was making money a goal for Deep Mind?
  - woeirua 3y ago
    I have to assume so, if not why else did Google acquire them?
felixfurtak 3y ago
Good name. I guess 'Deep Thought' was already taken
owenbrown 3y ago
I wonder if they will converge on using Trax (Google Brain) or Tensor Flow / PyTorch. I use Trax is my NLP class, so I hope it gets more adoption.
- querez 3y ago
  Both DeepMind and Brain use Jax, so they will definitely use Jax. However, they use different high level frameworks: All of DeepMind uses Haiku, while on the Brain side there are competing frameworks, with flax currently being the most often used one AFAIK. I'm not aware of anyone using trax there, and I would not expect it to get more adoption, on the contrary.
fancyfredbot 3y ago
It's an embarrassment to Google to have two independent AI research teams. It looks like a failure of management and oversight. I'm very surprised it took this long for them to be merged.
dflock 3y ago
If only Sundar Pichai was a good at executing on product & strategy as he is at winning internal fights at Google.
hintymad 3y ago
> Sundar, Jeff Dean, James Manyika, and I have built a fantastic partnership as we’ve worked to coordinate our efforts over recent mo We’re also creating a new Scientific Board for Google DeepMind to oversee research progress and direction of the unit, which will be led by Koray and will have representatives from across the orgs. Jeff, Koray, Zoubin, Shane and myself will be finalising the composition of this board together in the coming days. How is it different from Google's structure of having reviewing committees over everything? I hope that this is not yet another layer of gatekeepers. In a large enough organization, the high-level leads have such fragmented attention and such ingrained tendency towards avoiding political mistakes that they mainly contribute concerns instead of ideas, especially product ideas. As a result, they become gatekeepers and projects slow down. The larger an oversight committee is, the more concerns a project will receive, and the more mediocre the project will be because the team will focus on making the committee happy instead of making hard trade-offs with fast iterations. Of course, the Scientific Board consists of people way over my caliber, so they may well do a fantastic job for Google.
w_for_wumbo 3y ago
While AI ethicists and safety researchers are urging for a pause to understand the implications of what we have already built, Google is announcing they will invest more in the acceleration of Artificial Intelligence.
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  >AI ethicists and safety researchers Aka grifters. Those are the new DEI consultants.
deleted 3y ago
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karmasimida 3y ago
Summarized by ChatGPT: > DeepMind and Google Research's Brain team are merging to form a new unit called Google DeepMind, which will combine their talents and resources to accelerate progress towards building ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly. This will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs and AI products across Google and Alphabet, while transforming industries, advancing science, and serving diverse communities. The new unit will be led by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, with Eli Collins joining the leads team as VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani joining the research leadership team reporting to Koray Kavukcuoglu. A new Scientific Board for Google DeepMind will also be created to oversee research progress and direction.
dahwolf 3y ago
It all sounds so fancy, such grand vision. In reality, this is just Sundar looking through the org chart and saying: wow, these things seem related. Let's combine them because surely that will mean that it starts working. Just so that he can announce "something" as a growing army of sharks are snapping at his feet.
cmarschner 3y ago
Somebody got a bad performance review
imranq 3y ago
I wonder what will happen to isomorphic labs which Demis is also leading
walnutclosefarm 3y ago
Google has to be freaked out at the rapidity with which OpenAI and Microsoft are taking their generative language models into various markets. Look at the way Microsoft is (fairly successfully) grabbing attention-share through the efforts of Peter Lee and others in healthcare with GPT-4, e.g. - Google is floundering in comparison (despite having a huge head start, particular through DeepMind). I don't know that I'm convinced Microsoft can actually make good on the promises they are suggesting, but it's be a daft bet on Google's part to assume they can't.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  I agree. The only reasonable explanation (from the outside) is that a bunch of Legal AI doomers put guardrails and red tape everywhere inside DeepMind, preventing anything that’d look like a go-to-product.
Mandatum 3y ago
We’re still a long, long, long way from AGI. Releases like this are more about stock price and investment than anything else. I’m glad we’ve put more investment into this area as ultimately AGI will be able to uplift a large sector of the population that historically went underserved, or at least level the playing field. But statements like this are meaningless wank.
astrange 3y ago
Do you think they'll remember they own Waze now?
zmmmmm 3y ago
Two specifics here that seem problematic for me and I am curious about 1) DeepMind was given very significant autonomy since day 1 it was acquired. I find it very hard to believe that any attempt to take that away won't result in huge internal problems and / or attrition 2) Sundar Pichai has been coming in for a lot of criticism in general because he seems to be constantly out-maneuvered by Microsoft and we have seen very little new emerge from Google under his watch. Putting himself at the helm of this is going to really accentuate this and actually seems high risk - if he is the the reason Google is struggling to deliver elsewhere then positioning himself at the apex of an existentially important effort could be lethal. Added together, there seems like a high risk this could go catastrophically wrong for Google, and Pichai in particular. Maybe it will work, but the downside is enormous.
- amf12 3y ago
  > Sundar Pichai has been coming in for a lot of criticism in general because he seems to be constantly out-maneuvered by Microsoft "constantly" is a reach.
schappim 3y ago
TL;DR: • DeepMind and Google Research's Brain team merging into single unit: Google DeepMind • Goal: accelerate progress in AI and AGI development safely and responsibly • Demis Hassabis leading the new unit • Close collaboration with Google Product Areas • Aim: improve lives of billions, transform industries, advance science, serve diverse communities • Greater speed, collaboration, and execution needed for biggest impact • Combining world-class AI talent with resources and infrastructure • DeepMind and Brain teams' research laid foundations for current AI industry • New Scientific Board for Google DeepMind overseeing research progress and direction • Upcoming town hall meeting for further information and clarity
summerlight 3y ago
One important signal here is that Jeff is now freed from his daily managerial works and can focus on Pathways. I think the overall vision from Pathways is the right approach but in my pure impression, the current direction is more focused on scaling out the model rather than making inference more efficient. Now the project is going to get much a stronger technical leadership, so I expect some interesting developments regarding productionization story in the foreseeable future.
bitL 3y ago
I fear Google will taint DeepMind and make is as inept as its core org.
up2isomorphism 3y ago
This shear panic does not look good for Google, because openAI does not has a technological advantage but a marketing advantage, something Google does not have an upper hand compared to Microsoft.
hgsgm 3y ago
Interesting that a pair of Linguistic Olympians wrote that titlegore horror of an intro sentence.
vivegi 3y ago
Perhaps someone asked Google Bard What should Google do to catch up on the AI race? and this re-org was one of the suggestions. /s
huksley 3y ago
While other cool kids building stuff, Google goes through bureaucracy and power struggle to decide who would be in control and will receive raises and bonuses...
coding123 3y ago
Facepalm, picard facepalm, super facepalm... This is like the imagen announcement. Still can't use it. I'm not seeing any AI here. Yet when OpenAI "announces" things, we all have a new toy immediately. OpenAI is Apple, Google is just a PR firm at this point.
doomleika 3y ago
I suppose with org like Google like this some overhaul is necessary. But I felt they are still playing politics when OpenAI/MS et, al. is murdering their profit margin.
admissionsguy 3y ago
So Google's response to OpenAI is... bureaucratic? Creating and rearranging organizations and committees, and making big announcements is how the EU responds to challenges. The actual results often underwhelm.
karulont 3y ago
I thought that this is a way to downsize: instead of supporting two orgs, merge them and the costs hopefully go down?
oars 3y ago
Fantastic comments in this thread. Worth reading again in the future.

Sounds like a smart decision short term questionable long term (more focus on product instead of fundamental research).

luma 3y ago
Their existing “all research/no product” approach is becoming increasingly untenable. This had to happen if Google wants to remain a going concern.
- nwoli 3y ago
  Transformers were fundamental research that ended up having huge side benefits. (Google has plenty of money to keep spending on fundamental research, especially focused on smart things like ML.)
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    Inventing transformers may prove to be Google's undoing. Being a research paper factory doesn't seem to be good for shareholders.
    - politician 3y ago
      Still, inventing XMLHttpRequest wasn't Microsoft's undoing, but for many years we suspected it might be. This might be a similar situation.

For context: this is pretty surprising, given the significant amount of independence Deepmind had within Google. So much so, in fact, that they tried for a long time to be spun off from Google: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...

cubefox 3y ago
Yeah. DeepMind has sought more independence than they had, but now they have lost it completely. It seems there was an internal power struggle and Google won.
- pneumonic 3y ago
  Sounds like some key people will be leaving "Google Deepmind" in the next few months.
  - dmix 3y ago
    The people who want to do R&D disconnected from product dev should be leaving Google Deepmind. There's still a valuable role for them elsewhere and there will always been money to fund them. Doesn't mean that Google will suddenly be at a disadvantage as a result though.
mFixman 3y ago
One of the biggest liberties DeepMind had was a completely separate hiring process and pipeline than Google. Their open positions mysteriously disappeared on November last year and they are still closed outside of specific senior roles and a very open ended "register your interest if you have a PhD". Big loss for DeepMind if the separate pipeline is lost. Being able to hire for their priorities instead of whatever Google's hiring for is one of the reasons it was so successful.

bgirard 3y ago

> When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality. Well it was at least a decade away.

skilled 3y ago
I apologize for the confusion.
- ukuina 3y ago
  This is an underrated comment that cuts sharp.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rvz 3y ago

About time and finally for some very serious competition against O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com but unsurprising that DeepMind would be directly involved [0] and merged with Brain. Now lets get on with accelerating the real AI race to zero and the big fight against O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com, X.AI and the other stragglers. Stay very tuned to this. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508997

open592 3y ago
Funnily your comment made me wonder who owns "ai.com" - So I tried it out, and got redirected to "https://chat.openai.com/ https://chat.openai.com/".
- SXX 3y ago
  I guess we can just call them that without "open" part.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  ai.com's domain registration doesn't seem to be owned by OpenAI. And, ironically, ai.com's registrar (not registrant) is Google LLC. https://whois.domaintools.com/openai.com https://whois.domaintools.com/openai.com https://whois.domaintools.com/ai.com https://whois.domaintools.com/ai.com
  - endorphine 3y ago
    They're probably renting it from the original owner.

robbiemitchell 3y ago

How does this fit in with Bard? I see no mention of Jack Krawczyk here, who is listed as its product lead.

dormento 3y ago
I think they'll google-news the name "Bard" due to bad reception caused by unrealistic expectations (and a market primed by vastly superior alternatives).
- ukuina 3y ago
  Absolutely. They would never go to market with a name like Bard. The name would need to be focus grouped and optimized to no end before reveal.

SeanAnderson 3y ago

A couple of thoughts: - This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step to mitigating those fears. - Google has currently given ~300M to Anthropic and has a partnership with them. I assume Google continues to see potential in both avenues and won't neglect one AI team for the other. I'm guessing that DeepMind will be their primary focus because of the numerous, real-world applications already at play. - It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. They seem to be very different approaches. Yet, they both have support for language and imagery. So, perhaps they aren't that different afterall? - Still waiting to hear more from Google on how they plan to leverage their novel PaLM architecture. The API for it was released a month ago, but, to my awareness, has yet to take the world by storm. (Q: Bard isn't powered by PaLM, right?) Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area. I trust DeepMind's team and I trust Google's research teams, but Google's ability to execute and take products to market has been quite weak thus far. My gut says this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy.

Xeoncross 3y ago
Yeah, the message seems be "Wait, we're still here! Don't forget about us and we promise we'll catch up!" > Announcing Google DeepMind... launched DeepMind back in 2010 ...
notatoad 3y ago
>pushing resources into DeepMind is this a influx of resources, or consolidation and cutbacks? i read it as google used to have two different ai research teams, and now they have one fewer than they used to. they've shut down at least one deepmind office recently: https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmonton-site-as-part-of-google-layoffs/ https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmon...
GreedClarifies 3y ago
"this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy." I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google. Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research paper game and into the product game. Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward. Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment between the company's goals and those of the employees. Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine, but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't that wealthy.

simple10 3y ago

> I’m sure you will have lots of questions about what this new unit will look like for you. Can any HN Googlers comment on what this announcement means? Is this announcement just a PR move to get people to pay attention to upcoming announcements? Or does it actually have deeper impact to the way Google functions with internal teams?

ipnon 3y ago
DeepMind is going to stop making models to do MineCraft speedruns, and instead start making models to improve search results and ad click through rates.
- simple10 3y ago
  Lol. Makes sense. Any idea why they're queuing this up for a multiple announcement PR stunt? Seems a bit out of character for Google to tease out announcements like this. My guess is they have a bigger announcement coming next week. Otherwise, it seems like a bad PR move... it positions Google as playing catchup in AI... which is accurate, but strange PR.
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    PR blitz because it's going to look good to investors. Google is killing the vanity projects and moonshots and rolling those resources into teams that aim to launch products in the next 6-12 months.
- okdood64 3y ago
  Bingo. This feels like Google is _trying to get serious_ about leveraging DeepMind to create better products right now (and generate more revenue) instead of: "Look at this robot play soccer. Cool, huh?"
QuercusMax 3y ago
I'm a Googler in the Research PA (Health AI), and as far as I can tell this will have ~0 impact on my life. Jeff Dean gave himself a promotion and doesn't want to run an org any more; aside from that, :shrug:?

xyst 3y ago

ChatGPT changed the game. Big G getting scared of falling behind. G bought out DeepMind a long time ago. I wonder what they offered C-level execs this time around.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rollinDyno 3y ago

When was the last time Google was proactive rather than reactive? It feels that this is the same for all big Tech firms except for Microsoft.

darth_aardvark 3y ago
The Metaverse is (was?) definitely proactive.
- ulfw 3y ago
  What metaverse does Google proactively pursue?
  - pb7 3y ago
    >It feels that this is the same for all big Tech firms except for Microsoft. Meta is a big tech firm.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gojomo 3y ago
Thy've been proactive in deleting chat logs that they were ordered by courts to keep for pending litigation.

Abecid 3y ago

Looks like DeepMind will no longer be able to pursue academic research with the pressure to monetize. Talent exodus could happen similar to what happened at Google AI where many prominent researchers either went to OpenAI or started their own companies

ShamelessC 3y ago
Agreed. I'm seeing multiple other comments here suggesting DeepMind was somehow a waste when they have done a lot of very impressive research. "Solving" protein folding. Retrieval transformers. Novel solutions to math problems using ML? What about beating fucking Lee Sedol in go? No? None of that matters? C'mon.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Those are towering achievements that don't add to Google as a business. It was an important part of Google's reputation, but now that reputation is in the mud as Microsoft and OpenAI become king in the eyes of the public.
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  Arguably none of that made a comparable difference to the life of a common man as ChatGPT did. It's necessary to do fundamental research, but imperative to maintain focus on delivering real world value to real world people.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
> started their own companies Do you know if there's a list of such companies floating around? Really curious to see where the research talent in the space is heading, especially if they're leaving the warm embrace of their BigCo...

macns 3y ago

.. Sundar is announcing that DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research will be joining forces as a single, focused unit called Google DeepMind This would be enough as an anouncement, rest of it is just sugar coating.

ur-whale 3y ago

About fucking time someone cracked the whip and get the money sinkhole that is deepmind to producing something that contributes to the bottom line. Only took something that can potentially take out Google (GPT4) to make it happen.

dougmwne 3y ago

While ultimately I think this is probably a very good organizational change, to have similar teams working on similar projects under the same leadership, it does seem to spell trouble in the short term. I can read between the lines that Google is done having Deepmind floating out there independently creating foundational research and not products. Sounds like this is a sign that they've internally recognized they are behind and need all their resources pulling in the same directions towards responding to the OpenAI/Microsoft threat. It also seems to signal that they won't have their answer to Bing in the short term. As they say, nine women can't make a baby in a month and adding people to a late project makes it later.

version_five 3y ago
This sounds about right. I think it's acknowledged that OpenAI's strength has been product rather than just pure research - google and facebook both have way more publications and deeper benches, but aren't really commercializing anything. The shift to commercialization (by companies) was inevitable. It's also a bit sad though. Somebody still has to do the fundamental stuff, and Google (along with Facebook) have been amazing for the ecosystem, especially open source. If everyone is going the OpenAI route, the golden age of AI is going be be over as we to the profit extraction phase
- dougmwne 3y ago
  I see your point, though I think it's ultimately going to be good for AI progress. So far the research has been mostly a vanity project for these companies. Who knew if there was really any gold at the end of those rainbows. Eventually the appetite for participating in the research paper olympics was going to run out, probably right at the same time that monetary policy stayed tight for too long. The possibility of building a trillion dollar company on this tech means a whole lot more investment, more people entering the field. More people excited to tinker in their spare time and more practical knowledge gained. More GPUs in more data centers. Eventually things will loop back around to pure research with that many more resources applied. It sure beats an AI winter, which probably would have been the alternative had LLMs not taken off.
- deleted 3y ago

Etheryte 3y ago

So statistically [0], expect this product to be shut down in 2027? [0] https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/ https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/

QuercusMax 3y ago
It's not a product, it's a research organization.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Department of Research Simulation

chevy90 3y ago

Cant believe when i heard this news of google lacking ai development despite being front runner in tech for too long and with all that talent under the hood. How times changes or is it true that nothing good lasts long?

divyekapoor 3y ago

"Sundar is announcing"... not "we are announcing"... speaks volumes as to the fact that this was a unilateral decision.

dougmwne 3y ago
Hah! Good catch. I doubt that was unintentional. Demis doesn't sound too pleased about having his merry band of misfits sucked into the mothership.
gsatic 3y ago
Obviously. Who wants to work on adtech? Only ppl without a choice or a clue.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

This is what panic looks like.

ulfw 3y ago
Same as the Google Plus days under wonderful Vic Gundotra.

whywhywhydude 3y ago

Exciting time for AI. A little competition from OpenAI is finally forcing google AI researchers to actually focus on real world applications instead of just publishing papers and patting themselves on the back.

galaxytachyon 3y ago
What do you mean? The attention based transformer architecture was created by Google. AlphaFold took the biotech world by storm. Tensorflow is significant platform for AI developers. Chinchilla pioneered new method to improve LLM. "Just publishing paper" is such an ignorant and dismissive attitude to one of the most significant contributors to AI development in the world. Without Google research and publication, OpenAI would not have the foundation to build its GPT to the current level.
- mrbungie 3y ago
  The whole point is that all the progress you mention is worth peanuts to Google's shareholders. Hence this decision and blog post about it. If anything it allowed competitors to raise above Google. PS: Not saying Deepmind's research is not worthy, nor that this is fair. Just that it appears that Alphabet/Google (and by extension Deepmind) is being reminded that its main goal is making money.
  - pb7 3y ago
    Ah, classic damned if you, damned if you don't. Search is being ruined by the pursuit of maximizing ad revenue but AI research is being wasted because it's not used in pursuit of maximizing revenue. Can't really win, huh? There should be nothing but gratitude that Google uses its ad revenue to pay for research that greatly benefits everyone.
    - mrbungie 3y ago
      I'm not judging. I'm grateful of Alphabet/Google and that its research is being extremely useful in AI/ML, just saying shareholders may not think that way.

Imnimo 3y ago

It wasn't very long ago that we were reading articles saying that Deepmind wanted more independence from Google (https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...). Feels a bit like China absorbing Hong Kong.

SilverBirch 3y ago

I feel like this is a bad sign. What this announcement reads like is "Hey! I won this internal political struggle!". Ok, sure, not sure why anyone outside the company should take this as good news. This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape goat for missing AI. Remember - what this announcement means is that Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure. Trying to synthesize those two separate teams (half of which wanted you to fail) into one productive and world-leading team is a hell of an ask.

dougmwne 3y ago
Yeah, absolutely lining him up to be the scapegoat. His chance for success seems severely compromised and his mission was always to invent AGI, not create some kind of lowly ad-search product. The party sounds over for him and I bet he will be out and off to the next research think-tank soon.
hervature 3y ago
My outsider perspective is that DeepMind was the research arm and Brain was specifically tasked with making the company money through AI/ML applications. This appears to me that Google is combining the two to make sure that DeepMind starts turning a profit by adopting Brain's mission. Of course, DeepMind's brand is orders of magnitude more valuable so it makes sense to keep the name around. Would be happy to hear more knowledgeable takes on if this is an incorrect reading of the tea leaves.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Will we ever live in a world where people once again use first-person pronouns?
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    I asked GPT-4 to do it and it scattered first-person pronouns everywhere. https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 Happy now?

rvba 3y ago

Reorganizing two teams that did their own thing will not reap immediate benefits. It will take time. Sounds like a PR move.

pcj-github 3y ago

Will Google stop sharing progress in foundational AI research to it's competitors now?

jeffbee 3y ago
Why? The foundational research papers have all come from Google Brain/Google Research and not from DeepMind.
- mirker 3y ago
  Many of those people left though.

ugh123 3y ago

I'm curious what this will mean for DeepMind's work in medical and bioscience applications vs. now what may be more aligned with Google products and Anthropic which seem to be prioritizing commercializing consumer applications over science.

theGnuMe 3y ago
There's always Isomorphic Labs.

gojomo 3y ago

Sure, a reorg'll fix things.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
Refactoring for directors.

mnd999 3y ago

Expecting all their products to get cancelled in ~6months.

rhyme-boss 3y ago

Accelerating AI development and improving safety are inherently contradictory. It's pretty annoying and disingenuous when someone says "this move will speed us up and make us safer".

seydor 3y ago

Google Mind or Deep Brain?

rasengan 3y ago

Google, did you really just copy OpenAI's website layout [1]? Google isn't the leader anymore. -_____- [1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt

okdood64 3y ago
Seems like a pretty cookie cutter start-up style website in 2023...

sva_ 3y ago

I'm worried that OpenAI has started a trend of these AI companies being a lot more secretive about their research in the future. I mean basically OpenAI took Deepmind's/Google's public research on transformers and ran with it, not publishing back the results of improving it. This probably sent a bad message with consequences for the whole public research field.

neel8986 3y ago
I agree with this. Last decade was golden age of AI where all major players including Google brain, deepmind, FAIR, Microsoft Research contributed a lot. To honest OpenAI had the least intellectual contribution of them all except of few marketing material masquerading as papers. From now on we can expect all labs to secretive and not publish anything. This is really bad considering all this models are black box and research is needed to understand them better. Hope government comes into picture and forces this labs to explain details of each model
- tempusalaria 3y ago
  FAIR will continue to publish. Nvidia and Uber also. Then you have open source oriented labs who should continue publishing. Google is the big one. They have made more research contributions than all other labs combined basically.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    I'm not that plugged-in to the AI world (though doing my best to catch up)... but is Uber really viewed as a powerhouse on the same level as FAIR?
    - singhrac 3y ago
      No, not really. It was never really as large, and most of their output was in probabilistic programming (e.g. Pyro) and work that was relevant to self-driving cars (point cloud compression, etc.). But they shut down Uber AI in the layoffs last year.

xg15 3y ago

I guess Google is dancing alright.

aix1 3y ago

A lot of folks here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that this means that DeepMind is losing its independence. Other than the addition of the word "Google" - which could simply be a rebranding exercise - I am yet to see any evidence in support of that. P.S. In particular, there haven't been any indications that Demis's reporting line is changing.

tgtweak 3y ago

I remain confident that it is impossible for a "startup" or properly competitive standalone org to exist under the roof of Google. From reading these comments, it looks like this is at best mitigating some internal conflict.

paxys 3y ago

I have commented this many times on such articles, and will say it again: Google still thinks of AI as a research project, or at best a way to produce better search results. They essentially created the entire current generation of the AI space and then... gave it away, because no one on the product side understood what they had actually built. Handing the reins to the DeepMind team – who have never launched a single product in their history – seems to be a doubling down on that same failed strategy. Google doesn't need more smart AI researchers, academics or ethicists. They need product managers who understand the underlying technology and can commercialize it. They need pragmatic engineers who can execute, launch and maintain services. That has always been their problem as a company.

lallysingh 3y ago
They're the new Xerox, looking at PARC's output and asking, "How will this make our copiers better?" Internally, everyone's asking "How will this help my promo packet?"
- wmeredith 3y ago
  Absolutely. You could also sub in Microsoft, looking at the internet in 2002 and asking, "how could this make Windows desktop better"?
  - crop_rotation 3y ago
    IE was already dominant by 2002. Microsoft didn't ignore the Internet. They went hell bent on it during Gates era and won decisevely. It's only when they had no competition IE got stuck and then surpassed.
    - paxys 3y ago
      If talking about bundling a web browser inside their OS, sure. It was more that Microsoft missed the entire potential of the internet as a whole and how fundamentally transformational it could be. They had no presence in online services, e-commerce, search and more until they saw competitors eating their lunch, and have been lagging behind ever since.

vessenes 3y ago

Sundar's email mentions something critical - Jeff Dean is going to be the Chief Scientist in DeepMind, and coordinate back to Sundar. This is a big deal; that move tells you that Google is taking being behind on public-facing AI seriously, Dean is an incredibly valuable, incredibly scarce resource. If we wind way back to Google Docs, Gmail and Android strategy, they took market share from leaders by giving away high quality products. If I were in charge of strategy there, I would double down on the Stability / Facebook plan, and open source PaLM architecture Chinchilla-optimal foundation models stat. Then I'd build tooling to run and customize the models over GCP, so open + cloud. I'd probably start selling TPUv4 racks immediately as well. I don't believe they can win on a direct API business model this cycle. But, I think they could do a form of embrace and extend by going radically open and leveraging their research + deployment skills.

neximo64 3y ago
Jeff Dean is the reason OpenAI has beaten Google as it stands today. Not much weight in it being a good decision. He was too risk averse.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dougmwne 3y ago
That sounds like a fairly brilliant counter to "Open"AI. Something tells me that Google is still too scared of this tech in the hands of the public to go there though.
- owlglass 3y ago
  What indicates that Google is "too scared" as opposed to merely lagging behind?
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    Piles of previous statements talking about safety and a general unwillingness to put any of its models in the hands of anyone not under NDA. Bard is the first counterexample I can think of and that was forced by OpenAI.

w10-1 3y ago

Google politics and history aside, it's much better to link research with products for software. Unlike physics and biology, software is basically what we say it is, so there isn't a natural ordering to research (and it can wander forever, all too much like literary criticism). What both Google research and product missed, and ChatGPT provided almost accidentally, is that people need a way to answer ill-formed questions, and iteratively refine those questions. (The results are hit-or-miss, but far better than traditional search.) What both OpenAI, Bing, and now Google realize, is that the race is not to a bigger model but to capturing the feedback loop of users querying your model so you can learn how to better understand their queries. If Microsoft gets all that traffic, Google never even gets the opportunity to catch up. If Google were really smart, they would take another step: to break the mold of harvesting free users and instead pay representative users to interact with their stuff, in order to catch up. Just the process of operationalizing the notion of "representative" will vastly improve both product and research, and it would build goodwill in communities everywhere - goodwill they'll need to remain the default. Progressive queries are just the leading edge of entire worlds of behavior that are yet ill-fitted to computers, but could be accommodated via AI. And if your engineers consider the problem as "fuzzy" search or "prompt engineering" or realism, you need to get people with more empathy, a minimal understanding of phenomenology, and enough experience with multiple cultures and discourses to be able to relate and translate

galaxyquanta 3y ago

What does this mean for JAX (light-weight ML library from Google Brain) vs Tensorflow (from Deepmind)?

johnmoberg 3y ago
DeepMind already seem to be using JAX quite extensively: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/using-jax-to-accelerate-our-research https://www.deepmind.com/blog/using-jax-to-accelerate-our-re...
tarvaina 3y ago
Tensorflow is also from Google Brain, not DeepMind.

waselighis 3y ago

There's an interesting history behind the RCA CED (Capacitance Electronic Disk), an attempt to put video on vinyl. While the full history behind it's failure is complicated, a large factor was the differing priorities between research and other departments that delayed the product by several years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA Considering some of the other comments about merging two AI departments together (DeepMind and Brain) and injecting more bureaucracy into DeepMind, it seems to have some parallels with the story of the RCA CED. You can't just let researchers do research. There needs to be a clear goal/priority that this research can eventually be converted into a profitable product or service. Otherwise, the researchers will continue to work on "cool projects" and publishing papers with their name on them, with little consideration given to how to monetize this research. Personally, I'm not a fan of this AI gold rush trying to inject AI into everything. It's just interesting to ponder.

xnx 3y ago

I'm surprised to see so many comments in this thread criticizing Google for not milking more money out of their AI research sooner. Not being a shareholder, I'm pretty happy with how they catalyzed the modern AI revolution and have worked on very hard and meaningful problems like protein folding.

dougmwne 3y ago
People can be negative and critical for no reason. In this case, I think criticism is due because Google's failure to productize has lead them to a potential existential disaster. Most of their revenue depends on search and there being an ecosystem of websites to link to and display even more of their ads. Generative AI is an existential risk to their current search interface, the ability to insert ads into that experience and there even being any ad-supported websites with free content to link to. With the reports that Samsung may switch to Bing, you could quickly see an exodus in users over to chat search. It wouldn't take much lost revenue to implode Google's business model and the business model of every ad-supported site on the internet.
- xnx 3y ago
  Fair. ChatGPT is definitely the most serious event in Google's long and utterly dominant history of web search. Samsung is definitely using ChatGPT as a negotiating tactic with Google. I assume that ad revenue share is part of the arrangement. There's no way that Bing Ads could match the amount that Google Ads pays out to Samsung. This whole space is moving excitingly fast, but it's still too early to claim that anyone has "won" the space. If I had to bet who had the most advanced and most used AI service 5 years from now, I would definitely bet on Google.
- amf12 3y ago
  > Most of their revenue depends on search Ads actually, but via Search yes. > and there being an ecosystem of websites to link to and display even more of their ads. Regardless of the change in the interface, the websites aren't going anywhere. Maybe they'd be more tailored for LLMs to parse than humans. > Generative AI is an existential risk to their current search interface, I don't think so. It'd be easy to pivot to a different interface if it gains popularity after the initial hype. There are still a lot of monetizable queries that people use Search for, and won't use LLMs. > the ability to insert ads into that experience and there even being any ad-supported websites with free content to link to. It'd be easy to insert ads in LLM responses. I think LLMs will be a good thing for Google Ads. Right now, people hate ads on web because they are obnoxious and are competing for attention. Inserting ads in LLM responses will much less distracting and valuable. Ask Google Search chat which TV should I buy based on my criteria, and Google could suggest the top brands, and "ads" for where you could buy it. For example: "there is a promotion going on at your local BestBuy for this TV" or whatever. They have this info in the Shopping tab.

HopenHeyHi 3y ago

If Google were to go on a startup acquisition spree in this hot new competitive space in a further attempt to catch up - how would they locate and assess potential companies? Asking for a friend.

ipaddr 3y ago
They would buy someone they have started a relationship with already most likely. Your friend needs an introduction

deleted 3y ago

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m3kw9 3y ago

Google still researching lol

agnosticmantis 3y ago

I wonder if this change has any implications for the TensorFlow vs. JAX situation/transition. IIRC I read that DeepMind mainly used JAX, but not sure about the Brain. Any insights from the people in the know? It seems JAX is the future, but TF dominates current production stacks.

arkano 3y ago
Flax, a big neural network JAX library, is developed and used by Brain. TF will stay around for boilerplate / data-loading, but JAX support probably isn’t going anywhere.

alecco 3y ago

Musk recruiters for X.ai must be salivating.

turnsout 3y ago

Another Google AI announcement with no product in sight

alecco 3y ago

Microsoft was smart on letting OpenAI keep doing their thing. Pichai seems to have chosen to micromanage DeepMind. The board should find an actual CEO ASAP.

krn 3y ago

I am a big fan of Alphabet as a company, but this is how I read the first two paragraphs... > When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality. Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI saw back in 2015". > Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history. Translation: "Now we live in a time in which AI research and technology has advanced exponentially thanks to the great achievements by our competitors – and we clearly feel left behind."

auggierose 3y ago
Right. You know that DeepMind did AlphaGo, right? It made its entrance in 2015.
- krn 3y ago
  And how does that compare with what OpenAI has accomplished since 2015? I'm not blaming DeepMind here. It was Google's job not to start loosing ground to Microsoft in the age of AI.
  - auggierose 3y ago
    Personally, I feel AlphaGo was the biggest deal ever. It put AI truly on the map. OpenAI is just a corollary to that, and would not exist without DeepMind in the first place.
    - krn 3y ago
      That's probably true, because OpenAI was formed just two months after AlphaGo defeated the European Go champion Fan Hui. But Google has missed a lot of opportunities since then, and is now trying to catch up.
    - nicetryguy 3y ago

earthboundkid 3y ago

> Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history. I'm not an AI Doomer, but is there some kind of scenario where the coming of AGI doesn't trigger a communist revolution and a lot of death and destruction along the way? I dunno, maybe it could be a Fabian revolution, but seems pretty unlikely. Seems more like AGI → everyone is pissed off that they still have to work for a living → a lot of rich people with heads on pikes. Is there some other scenario that's more likely? Doesn't feel that way to me. Then again, I'm the creator of https://bellriots.netlify.app/ https://bellriots.netlify.app/, so maybe I'm a Revolution Doomer.

scottyah 3y ago
It'll get a lot of people off the internet, and wreck the lives of those who stay addicted.

fudged71 3y ago

I hear there's office space they could use in Edmonton ;)

deleted 3y ago

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uptownfunk 3y ago

End of the day, the best product innovation has come from hungry passionate and capable founders with a solid mix of science, engineering and product. As we are now seeing before our eyes, Google has aged. Big tech cushy culture does no longer creates an environment that yields innovation. The MSFT move was probably brilliant most for this reason. They saw the writing on the wall. ChatGPT would never have been invented at any big tech co. Goog investment in anthropic is just taking msft sloppy seconds and kind of copy cat play. Who knows maybe anthropic will make a happy mistake and create something surprising. You are likely reading the result of a lot of corporate reorg that was a big political battle and the victors are now patting themselves on the back. That said, reorg can be good to refocus the company, but you’re bleeding out massively while the infection spreads, putting a little bandaid is no reason to celebrate. Anyways wish them the best of luck. As a kid it was always one of those companies we all dreamed to work for. Now it is like an aged grandparent who needs a cane to walk and encouragement when they are able to walk by themselves.

next_xibalba 3y ago

Competition is such a beautiful catalyst.

sdfghswe 3y ago

I hear that Demis had been fighting this for a while. I guess he lost. Which..... of course he did. They don't make any money. That's ultimately how these decisions are made. I talked to one of their in-house recruiters (or HR or whatever) some 5-6(?) years ago. I asked them how they make money, they gave me a really muddled answer. It had the word "clients" in there. I didn't understand, so I tried to clarify, I said "oh, you make revenue from consulting for your clients?". Then they gave me a crystal clear answer, they said: "No, we're a lab". I noped outta there really fast. In retrospect, I was right that I wouldn't have made any money, but might've been a good boost for my CV to do for a couple of years.

javier_e06 3y ago

[flagged]

omot 3y ago

From this blog post, I could already feel the bureaucratic nature of their org. My money's still on OpenAI. I think their motivation is more pure, their objectives more focused, and their org more simple. I usually think of product dominance in two vectors: first to market and benchmarks. Google took over the world as something like the 11th search engine to hit the market, but some of their benchmarks were 10x better. OpenAI has both going for them right now and I don't think that's going to change.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

OpenAI, Musk's whatever the name, Google Mind, the other dozen projects that spring up every single day. -- I just read Scott Alexanders Meditations on Moloch for the first time, and this mad rush to monetize AI seems to be right on track.

mason96 3y ago

[dead]

abraxas 3y ago

I wonder where this puts Geoff Hinton in this new hierarchy. He still works for Google, doesn't he?

neximo64 3y ago

This demonstrates to shareholders of Alphabet that Sundar is actually not a good CEO. The focus is not on the product or quality but organising resources. The resources are already the best at Google but led by a moron.

Takennickname 3y ago

Am I the only one who thinks this is Sundar screwing up big time? If there's only one AI team, and it fails, then you blame whoever is leading them. If there's multiple teams, and they all fail, there's only Sundar to blame.

frozenlettuce 3y ago

Does anyone else feels some sort of "corporate-speak-blindness" when reading these statements from Google? They are just informing that some orgs are being rearranged, but for some reason they had to make the text have super low information density.

theGnuMe 3y ago

My take: 1. All fundamental AI research now falls under Demis. So basically what was Brain is now Deep Brain. 2. Jeff will lead the product build out of a multi-modal AI (LLM). 3. Google research under James will continue with everything else not directly AI related.

dahwolf 3y ago

"Combining our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress towards a world in which AI helps solve the biggest challenges facing humanity" ...which is that we're not looking at enough ads.

woeirua 3y ago

This move makes sense from the perspective that DeepMind has some street cred in their ability to produce novel models that solve interesting problems. The only issue is that DeepMind has also suffered from the same problems that the mothership has: an inability to execute. Are there any documented success stories of DeepMind making serious money off their models? They've been great at producing interesting and valuable research, but all of their partnerships have failed as far as I know. Google's screwed because LLMs offer us a fundamentally different business model for search, and I'm not convinced though that you can actually make a company out of LLMs that is as wildly profitable as Google was during its hayday. If that's true, then I just don't see how any CEO could go to the shareholders and say: "in order for us to survive, we have to accept that we're going to be a much smaller company in 5 years, both in terms of head count and profit." Sundar would be overthrown in a matter of days.

rcme 3y ago
Was making money a goal for Deep Mind?
- woeirua 3y ago
  I have to assume so, if not why else did Google acquire them?

felixfurtak 3y ago

Good name. I guess 'Deep Thought' was already taken

owenbrown 3y ago

I wonder if they will converge on using Trax (Google Brain) or Tensor Flow / PyTorch. I use Trax is my NLP class, so I hope it gets more adoption.

querez 3y ago
Both DeepMind and Brain use Jax, so they will definitely use Jax. However, they use different high level frameworks: All of DeepMind uses Haiku, while on the Brain side there are competing frameworks, with flax currently being the most often used one AFAIK. I'm not aware of anyone using trax there, and I would not expect it to get more adoption, on the contrary.

fancyfredbot 3y ago

It's an embarrassment to Google to have two independent AI research teams. It looks like a failure of management and oversight. I'm very surprised it took this long for them to be merged.

dflock 3y ago

If only Sundar Pichai was a good at executing on product & strategy as he is at winning internal fights at Google.

hintymad 3y ago

> Sundar, Jeff Dean, James Manyika, and I have built a fantastic partnership as we’ve worked to coordinate our efforts over recent mo We’re also creating a new Scientific Board for Google DeepMind to oversee research progress and direction of the unit, which will be led by Koray and will have representatives from across the orgs. Jeff, Koray, Zoubin, Shane and myself will be finalising the composition of this board together in the coming days. How is it different from Google's structure of having reviewing committees over everything? I hope that this is not yet another layer of gatekeepers. In a large enough organization, the high-level leads have such fragmented attention and such ingrained tendency towards avoiding political mistakes that they mainly contribute concerns instead of ideas, especially product ideas. As a result, they become gatekeepers and projects slow down. The larger an oversight committee is, the more concerns a project will receive, and the more mediocre the project will be because the team will focus on making the committee happy instead of making hard trade-offs with fast iterations. Of course, the Scientific Board consists of people way over my caliber, so they may well do a fantastic job for Google.

w_for_wumbo 3y ago

While AI ethicists and safety researchers are urging for a pause to understand the implications of what we have already built, Google is announcing they will invest more in the acceleration of Artificial Intelligence.

ReptileMan 3y ago
>AI ethicists and safety researchers Aka grifters. Those are the new DEI consultants.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

karmasimida 3y ago

Summarized by ChatGPT: > DeepMind and Google Research's Brain team are merging to form a new unit called Google DeepMind, which will combine their talents and resources to accelerate progress towards building ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly. This will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs and AI products across Google and Alphabet, while transforming industries, advancing science, and serving diverse communities. The new unit will be led by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, with Eli Collins joining the leads team as VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani joining the research leadership team reporting to Koray Kavukcuoglu. A new Scientific Board for Google DeepMind will also be created to oversee research progress and direction.

dahwolf 3y ago

It all sounds so fancy, such grand vision. In reality, this is just Sundar looking through the org chart and saying: wow, these things seem related. Let's combine them because surely that will mean that it starts working. Just so that he can announce "something" as a growing army of sharks are snapping at his feet.

cmarschner 3y ago

Somebody got a bad performance review

imranq 3y ago

I wonder what will happen to isomorphic labs which Demis is also leading

walnutclosefarm 3y ago

Google has to be freaked out at the rapidity with which OpenAI and Microsoft are taking their generative language models into various markets. Look at the way Microsoft is (fairly successfully) grabbing attention-share through the efforts of Peter Lee and others in healthcare with GPT-4, e.g. - Google is floundering in comparison (despite having a huge head start, particular through DeepMind). I don't know that I'm convinced Microsoft can actually make good on the promises they are suggesting, but it's be a daft bet on Google's part to assume they can't.

whiplash451 3y ago
I agree. The only reasonable explanation (from the outside) is that a bunch of Legal AI doomers put guardrails and red tape everywhere inside DeepMind, preventing anything that’d look like a go-to-product.

Mandatum 3y ago

We’re still a long, long, long way from AGI. Releases like this are more about stock price and investment than anything else. I’m glad we’ve put more investment into this area as ultimately AGI will be able to uplift a large sector of the population that historically went underserved, or at least level the playing field. But statements like this are meaningless wank.

astrange 3y ago

Do you think they'll remember they own Waze now?

zmmmmm 3y ago

Two specifics here that seem problematic for me and I am curious about 1) DeepMind was given very significant autonomy since day 1 it was acquired. I find it very hard to believe that any attempt to take that away won't result in huge internal problems and / or attrition 2) Sundar Pichai has been coming in for a lot of criticism in general because he seems to be constantly out-maneuvered by Microsoft and we have seen very little new emerge from Google under his watch. Putting himself at the helm of this is going to really accentuate this and actually seems high risk - if he is the the reason Google is struggling to deliver elsewhere then positioning himself at the apex of an existentially important effort could be lethal. Added together, there seems like a high risk this could go catastrophically wrong for Google, and Pichai in particular. Maybe it will work, but the downside is enormous.

amf12 3y ago
> Sundar Pichai has been coming in for a lot of criticism in general because he seems to be constantly out-maneuvered by Microsoft "constantly" is a reach.

schappim 3y ago

TL;DR: • DeepMind and Google Research's Brain team merging into single unit: Google DeepMind • Goal: accelerate progress in AI and AGI development safely and responsibly • Demis Hassabis leading the new unit • Close collaboration with Google Product Areas • Aim: improve lives of billions, transform industries, advance science, serve diverse communities • Greater speed, collaboration, and execution needed for biggest impact • Combining world-class AI talent with resources and infrastructure • DeepMind and Brain teams' research laid foundations for current AI industry • New Scientific Board for Google DeepMind overseeing research progress and direction • Upcoming town hall meeting for further information and clarity

summerlight 3y ago

One important signal here is that Jeff is now freed from his daily managerial works and can focus on Pathways. I think the overall vision from Pathways is the right approach but in my pure impression, the current direction is more focused on scaling out the model rather than making inference more efficient. Now the project is going to get much a stronger technical leadership, so I expect some interesting developments regarding productionization story in the foreseeable future.

bitL 3y ago

I fear Google will taint DeepMind and make is as inept as its core org.

up2isomorphism 3y ago

This shear panic does not look good for Google, because openAI does not has a technological advantage but a marketing advantage, something Google does not have an upper hand compared to Microsoft.

hgsgm 3y ago

Interesting that a pair of Linguistic Olympians wrote that titlegore horror of an intro sentence.

vivegi 3y ago

Perhaps someone asked Google Bard What should Google do to catch up on the AI race? and this re-org was one of the suggestions. /s

huksley 3y ago

While other cool kids building stuff, Google goes through bureaucracy and power struggle to decide who would be in control and will receive raises and bonuses...

coding123 3y ago

Facepalm, picard facepalm, super facepalm... This is like the imagen announcement. Still can't use it. I'm not seeing any AI here. Yet when OpenAI "announces" things, we all have a new toy immediately. OpenAI is Apple, Google is just a PR firm at this point.

doomleika 3y ago

I suppose with org like Google like this some overhaul is necessary. But I felt they are still playing politics when OpenAI/MS et, al. is murdering their profit margin.

admissionsguy 3y ago

So Google's response to OpenAI is... bureaucratic? Creating and rearranging organizations and committees, and making big announcements is how the EU responds to challenges. The actual results often underwhelm.

karulont 3y ago

I thought that this is a way to downsize: instead of supporting two orgs, merge them and the costs hopefully go down?

oars 3y ago

Fantastic comments in this thread. Worth reading again in the future.