Earlier today we announced some changes that will accelerate our progress in AI and help us develop more capable AI systems safely and responsibly. Here’s a recap of what DeepMind CEO Demis Hassambis shared with employees:
Hello Team
When we launched DeepMind in 2010, many people believed that general artificial intelligence was a fantasy science fiction technology that was decades away from becoming a reality.
Now, we live in an era in which artificial intelligence research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, artificial intelligence—and ultimately AGI—has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic, and scientific transformations in history.
That’s why today Sundar announces that DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research will join forces as a single, focused unit called Google DeepMind. The combination of our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress towards a world in which artificial intelligence helps solve the greatest challenges facing humanity, and I am incredibly excited to lead this unit and work with all of you to build it. Together, working closely with our fantastic colleagues across all Google product areas, we have a real opportunity to deliver AI research and products that dramatically improve the lives of billions of people, transform industries, advance science and serve diverse communities.
With the creation of Google DeepMind, I believe we can get to that future faster. Building increasingly capable and general AI, safely and responsibly, requires solving some of the most difficult scientific and engineering challenges of our time. To do this, we need to work with greater speed, stronger collaboration and execution, and simplify the way we make decisions to focus on achieving the greatest impact.
Through Google DeepMind, we’re bringing together our global AI talent with the computing power, infrastructure and resources to build the next generation of AI innovations and products across Google and Alphabet, and to do so with bold and responsible way. Research progress from the amazing Brain and DeepMind teams laid much of the foundation for the current AI industry, from Deep Reinforcement Learning to Transformers, and the work we’re about to do now as part of this new combined unit will create the next wave innovations that change the world.
Sundar, Jeff Dean, James Manyika and I have formed a fantastic partnership as we have worked to coordinate our efforts over the past few months. I look forward to working closely with Eli Collins, who will join my team lead as VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani who will join the research leadership team reporting to Koray Kavukcuoglu. We are also creating a new Scientific Council for Google DeepMind to oversee research progress and the direction of the unit, which will be chaired by Koray and have representatives from all organizations. Jeff, Koray, Zoubin, Shane and I will be finalizing the composition of this board together in the next few days.
I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions about what this new unit will look like for you, your teams, and all of us, and we’ll be working hard to provide clarity to everyone as quickly as possible. Read Sundar’s note and tune in to the town hall meeting tomorrow.
I am excited to be on this journey with you and look forward to seeing everyone soon.
Better
Demis