In a move it sees as a force multiplier, Alphabet is consolidating DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research into a unit called Google DeepMind, uniting the teams responsible for Google Brain with DeepMind, the UK-based artificial intelligence research lab acquired in 2014. Collective accomplishments include AlphaGo, Transformers, WaveNet and AlphaFold, as well as software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training and deploying large scale ML models. “Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” the company announced. Continue reading Google Restructures AI Research Units into Google DeepMind

Google seems to view ChatGPT as a threat to its $149 billion annual search business. OpenAI’s chatbot is said to have amazed those who’ve seen its ability to grasp concepts and generate ideas, which Google execs are concerned might translate to “a compelling new search experience,” according to reporting by The New York Times. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, is said to have wrangled Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for “several meetings” focused on ratcheting up Google’s AI development in an effort to overtake ChatGPT’s first-mover advantage. Continue reading Google Taps Page and Brin to Take on ChatGPT for AI Search

Google Research is touting new advances in artificial intelligence, which can now generate its own code and write fiction, in addition to better text-to-video and language translation. At a New York media event at Google’s Pier 57 office — which opened earlier this year to become the company’s third Manhattan outpost — roughly a dozen projects in various stages of development were on display, with robot learning, LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) and text-generated 3D images sharing the spotlight with practical AI for things like disaster management, weather forecasts and healthcare. Continue reading Google Shows Off Impressive Range of AI at NY Media Event

OpenAI unveiled DALL-E, which generates images from text using two multimodel AI systems that leverage computer vision and NLP. The name is a reference to surrealist artist Salvador Dali and Pixar’s animated robot WALL-E. DALL-E relies on a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3. OpenAI demonstrated that DALL-E can manipulate and rearrange objects in generated imagery and also create images from scratch based on text prompts. It has stated that it plans to “analyze how models like DALL·E relate to societal issues.” Continue reading OpenAI Unveils AI-Powered DALL-E Text-to-Image Generator

Google Senior Fellow Jeff Dean, who works on the Google Brain team, recently highlighted AutoML (for machine learning), a project aimed at using AI-empowered machines to build other AI machines, removing humans from the equation. The need for AI algorithms grows as its capabilities are becoming important to a wide range of industries. But only an estimated 10,000 people worldwide have the education, expertise and ability to construct those algorithms, and Facebook, Google and Microsoft pay millions of dollars for them. Continue reading Google Project Aims to Use AI to Develop More AI Algorithms