Earlier today, we announced some changes that will accelerate our progress in AI and lend a hand us develop more productive AI systems safely and responsibly. Below is a summary of what DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shared with employees:
Hello team
When we launched DeepMind in 2010, many people thought that general artificial intelligence was a far-fetched science fiction technology that took decades to become a reality.
We live in a time where artificial intelligence research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, artificial intelligence – and ultimately AGI – will have the potential to lead to 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 into one specialized unit called Google DeepMind. Combining our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress towards a world where artificial intelligence helps solve humanity’s greatest challenges. I’m incredibly excited to lead this unit and work with all of you to build it. Together, in close collaboration with our fantastic colleagues across Google’s product areas, we have a real opportunity to deliver AI research and products that radically improve the lives of billions of people, transform industries, advance science, and serve diverse communities.
I believe that by building Google DeepMind, we can get to that future faster. Creating increasingly productive and general AI in a unthreatening and responsible manner requires solving some of the most challenging scientific and engineering challenges of our time. To do this, we need to work faster, collaborate and execute more closely, and simplify the way we make decisions to focus on achieving the greatest impact.
With Google DeepMind, we connect world-class AI talent with the computing power, infrastructure and resources to create breakthrough next-generation AI solutions and products at Google and Alphabet, and do it in a bold and responsible way. The research advances of the phenomenal Brain and DeepMind teams have laid the foundation for today’s artificial intelligence industry, from deep reinforcement learning to transformers, and the work we will now do as part of this modern combined entity will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs.
Sundar, Jeff Dean, James Manyika and I have built a fantastic partnership as we have worked over the past few months to coordinate our efforts. I look forward to working closely with Eli Collins, who will join my leadership team as VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani, who will join the Research leadership team reporting to Koray Kavukcuoglu. We are also creating a modern Google DeepMind Scientific Council, which will supervise the progress of research and the direction of the unit’s development. It will be headed by Koray and representatives of all organizations will participate. Jeff, Koray, Zoubin, Shane and I will be finalizing the composition of this board together in the coming days.
I’m sure you’ll have many questions about what this modern entity will look like for you, your teams and all of us, so we’ll be working demanding to provide clarity for everyone as quickly as possible. Please read Sundar’s note and come to the town hall meeting tomorrow.
I’m excited to take this journey with you and I can’t wait to see everyone soon.
The best
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