The Banking Executive Magazine - April 2023 Issue

the BANKING EXECUTIVE 50 ISSUE 172 APRIL 2023 FinTech and AI Chornicle Google has consolidated its AI re- search labs, Google Brain and Deep- Mind, into a new unit named Google DeepMind. The move is seen as a strategic way for Google to maintain its edge in the competitive AI industry and compete with OpenAI. By combining the tal- ent and resources of both entities, Google DeepMind aims to acceler- ate AI advancements while maintain- ing ethical standards. The new unit will be responsible for spearheading groundbreaking AI products and advancements, and it will work closely with other Google product areas to deliver AI research and products. Google Research, the former parent division of Google Brain, will remain an independent division focused on “fundamental advances in computer science across areas such as algo- rithms and theory, privacy and secu- rity, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability, and re- sponsible AI.” Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, believes that the consolidation of the two AI research labs will bring to- gether world-class talent in AI with the computing power, infrastructure, and resources to create the next gen- eration of AI breakthroughs and products boldly and responsibly. Hassabis claims that the research ac- complishments of Google Brain and DeepMind have formed the founda- tion of the current AI industry—rang- ing from deep reinforcement learning to transformers. The newly consoli- dated unit will build upon this foun- dation to create the next generation of groundbreaking AI products and advancements that will shape the world. Over the years, Google and Deep- Mind have jointly developed several groundbreaking innovations. The duo’s achievements include Al- phaGo – which famously beat pro- fessional human Go players – and AlphaFold, an exceptional tool that accurately predicts protein struc- tures. Other noteworthy achievements in- clude word2vec, WaveNet, se- quence-to-sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX. These cutting-edge tools have proven highly effective for ex- pressing, training, and deploying large-scale ML models. Google’s acquisition of DeepMind for $500 million in 2014 paved the way for a fruitful collaboration be- tween the two entities. With the con- solidation of Google Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind, Google hopes to further advance its AI research and development capa- bilities. Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, will take on an elevated role as chief scientist for both Google Research and Google DeepMind. He has been tasked with setting the future direc- tion of AI research at the company, as well as heading up the most criti- cal and strategic technical projects related to AI, including a series of powerful multimodal AI models. The creation of Google DeepMind underscores Google and parent com- pany Alphabet’s commitment to fur- thering the pioneering research of both DeepMind and Google Brain. With the race to dominate the AI space becoming more intense, Google DeepMind is poised to ac- celerate AI advancements and create groundbreaking AI products and ad- vancements that will shape the world. GOOGLE CREATES NEW AI DIVISION TO CHALLENGE OPENAI