Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced “Google DeepMind” last week as the next major step in the tech conglomerate’s exploration of artificial intelligence. 

Google, which Pichai says has been an “AI-first company” since 2016, believes AI is the next critical step in its ability to continue improving upon its many core products – from Search and YouTube to Gmail and the high-resolution camera in the Pixel phones. 

“The pace of progress is now faster than ever before. To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly,” Pichai stated in the April 20 announcement. 

The group, known as Google DeepMind, will bring together two leading research groups in the AI field – the Brain team from Google Research, and DeepMind. 

Launched in 2010, DeepMind was a London-based AI company that took an interdisciplinary approach in bringing together new advances in machine learning, neuroscience, engineering, mathematics, simulation and computing infrastructure. It comprises a team of scientists, engineers, and ethicists who are committed to solving “intelligence” to help advance science and benefit humanity. 

Its earliest success in computer gaming can be traced back to its AlphaGo program, which learned how to play 49 different Atari games from scratch – just by seeing the pixels and score on the screen, marking the first program to beat a professional GO player. 

In 2014, DeepMind joined forces with Google, with its programs having helped identify and diagnose eye diseases, saving 30% of the energy used to keep data centers cool, and to predict the complex 3D shapes of proteins, which could one day, transform how drugs are invented. 

Between the two, their accomplishments in AI over the last decade span AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training, and deploying large scale ML models.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, will lead the development of the company’s general AI systems by and through the research that Pichai says will help to power the next generation of Google’s products and services. 

Google’s new Chief Scientist, Jeff Dean, will also be reporting directly to Pichai, while working alongside Hassabis to help lead Google’s “most critical and strategic technical projects related to AI” – the first of which, Pichai says will be a “series of powerful, multimodal AI models.”

In other news, read about Autonomous AI Agents and what you should know about them.