Google DeepMind continue with groundbreaking AI developments
Alphabet has announced it is merging its Google Brain and DeepMind units with the intention of achieving more capable and responsible AI systems. CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, stated in his announcement that: “Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI.”
On 20th April 2023, Google DeepMind announced this recent change by way of their new name, as the company joins forces with the Brain team from Google Research to create a single focused unit. With this partnership, the company hopes to continue tackling the biggest challenges facing humanity, working towards delivering AI research and products that improve human lives. This will not only continue major scientific advancement, but also dramatically transform industries as well as serve plenty of diverse communities.
Addressing the changes, CEO Demis Hassabis stated that: “By creating Google DeepMind, I believe we can get to that future faster. Building ever more capable and general AI, safely and responsibly, demands that we solve some of the hardest scientific and engineering challenges of our time. For that, we need to work with greater speed, stronger collaboration and execution, and to simplify the way we make decisions to focus on achieving the biggest impact.”
Scientific breakthroughs that question life as we know it
In addition to these developments, Google DeepMind has also achieved many scientific breakthroughs with AI, with the most recent being AlphaFold which can predict protein structures. They have effectively changed the way that this type of science operates, as researchers can analyse data in a much shorter space of time and hopefully tackle diseases. The company website also has a blog to share ideas and latest research on this and a wide range of other topics, including competitive programming and interactive video games for readers to learn more.
Also created by the company is a neural network that has learnt how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans. Likewise, a computer has been fashioned like the Turing machine, called the Neural Turing Machines, that infers simple algorithms such as copying and sorting, as well as being able to recall information much like the short-term memory of the human brain. Each team at Google DeepMind is working on technical safety, ethics, and public engagement. Throughout all of these developments, they help to anticipate short and long-term risks concerning AI, and explore ways to prevent these from happening, as well as finding ways to address issues if they do arise.
Google DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory founded in 2010 and was acquired by Google in 2014. The company’s ethos is that AI could be the most useful invention to humanity and so teams consisting of scientists and engineers work towards advancing science to greater benefit humanity. Being based in London, Google DeepMind also has research centres in France, the United States and Canada.
Founded in London by Demis Hassabis, along with co-founders Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, their goal was to create AI systems that could perform certain tasks at the same level as humans. The acquisition by Google in 2014 ultimately enabled its work to accelerate. The company as a whole has grown rapidly over the past decade, particularly with a global increased interest in AI. Particularly with the sudden acceleration of intelligence like ChatGPT, they developed an AI that can solve tasks as fast as humans in a 3D virtual world, as well as AlphaGo which can defeat a human at the complex game Go. With an increased capacity for intelligence, the idea is that an intelligent AI has the potential to master jobs in the real world.
