I have commented this many times on such articles, and will say it again:<p>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.<p>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.
A couple of thoughts:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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?<p>- 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?)<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>This probably sent a bad message with consequences for the whole public research field.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>Well it was at least a decade away.
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: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...</a>
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.<p>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.
It all sounds so fancy, such grand vision.<p>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.
Two specifics here that seem problematic for me and I am curious about<p>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<p>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.<p>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.
> I’m sure you will have lots of questions about what this new unit will look like for you.<p>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?
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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA</a><p>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.<p>Personally, I'm not a fan of this AI gold rush trying to inject AI into everything. It's just interesting to ponder.
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.<p>As we are now seeing before our eyes, Google has aged. Big tech cushy culture does no longer creates an environment that yields innovation.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
It wasn't very long ago that we were reading articles saying that Deepmind wanted more independence from Google (<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...</a>).<p>Feels a bit like China absorbing Hong Kong.
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.
I hear that Demis had been fighting this for a while. I guess he lost.<p>Which..... of course he did. They don't make any money. That's ultimately how these decisions are made.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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).<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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
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.<p>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.
Summarized by ChatGPT:<p>> 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.
I remain confident that it is impossible for a "startup" or properly competitive standalone org to exist under the roof of Google.<p>From reading these comments, it looks like this is at best mitigating some internal conflict.
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".
"Combining our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress towards a world in which AI helps solve the biggest challenges facing humanity"<p>...which is that we're not looking at enough ads.
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.
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.<p>Google took over the world as something like the 11th search engine to hit the market, but some of their benchmarks were 10x better.<p>OpenAI has both going for them right now and I don't think that's going to change.
About time and finally for some very <i>serious</i> competition against O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com but unsurprising that DeepMind would be directly involved [0] and merged with Brain.<p>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.<p>Stay very tuned to this.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508997" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508997</a>
We’re still a long, long, long way from AGI.<p>Releases like this are more about stock price and investment than anything else.<p>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.<p>But statements like this are meaningless wank.
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.
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.
My take:<p>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.
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.
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.
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.
Facepalm, picard facepalm, super facepalm...<p>This is like the imagen announcement. Still can't use it.<p>I'm not seeing any AI here.<p>Yet when OpenAI "announces" things, we all have a new toy immediately. OpenAI is Apple, Google is just a PR firm at this point.
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.
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.
About fucking time someone cracked the whip and get the money sinkhole that is deepmind to producing something that contributes to the bottom line.<p>Only took something that can potentially take out Google (GPT4) to make it happen.
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.
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.<p>How times changes or is it true that nothing good lasts long?
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.
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...
ChatGPT changed the game. Big G getting scared of falling behind.<p>G bought out DeepMind a long time ago. I wonder what they offered C-level execs this time around.
I wonder if they will converge on using Trax (Google Brain) or Tensor Flow / PyTorch.<p>I use Trax is my NLP class, so I hope it gets more adoption.
A lot of folks here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that this means that DeepMind is losing its independence.<p>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>P.S. In particular, there haven't been any indications that Demis's reporting line is changing.
> 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.<p>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 <a href="https://bellriots.netlify.app/" rel="nofollow">https://bellriots.netlify.app/</a>, so maybe I'm a Revolution Doomer.
TL;DR:<p><pre><code> • 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</code></pre>
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?<p>Asking for a friend.
So statistically [0], expect this product to be shut down in 2027?<p>[0] <a href="https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/" rel="nofollow">https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/</a>
.. <i>Sundar is announcing that DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research will be joining forces as a single, focused unit called Google DeepMind</i><p>This would be enough as an anouncement, rest of it is just sugar coating.
Google, did you really just copy OpenAI's website layout [1]?<p>Google isn't the leader anymore.<p>-_____-<p>[1] <a href="https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt</a>
I am a big fan of Alphabet as a company, but this is how I read the first two paragraphs...<p>> 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.<p>Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI saw back in 2015".<p>> 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.<p>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."