Google's parent company, Alphabet, is increasing its investment in artificial intelligence (AI) research by integrating its two most well-known divisions, Google Brain and DeepMind. The company made the move in an effort to compete with other AI systems, such OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, in the field's quickly changing environment.
The new division will be led by Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, and will focus on the "bold and responsible development of general AI," according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
Pichai stressed the significance of this step in strengthening the company's research capabilities and assuring its ongoing leadership in the field of AI in a blog post on Thursday.
A number of high-profile projects have already been completed by the teams that will be combined, including the transformer, a technology that serves as the foundation for some of OpenAI's own research. The creation of "multimodal" AI, akin to OpenAI's most recent model, GPT-4, will be prioritised moving forward by the united teams within Alphabet. This kind of AI can produce new material in response to inputs that include both text and images.
Wall Street is worried that Alphabet could lose ground to Microsoft in the race for artificial intelligence (AI) despite Google's dominance in the search market, where it holds a share of over 80%. The revamped Bing search engine is powered by technologies from OpenAI, which Microsoft funds.
To counter OpenAI's ChatGPT, Alphabet announced in February the release of Bard, its own chatbot. However, Bard's misleading claims in a promotional video and poor performance at a company event caused the corporation to lose $100 billion in value.
