Google is combining Brain and DeepMind into one team: 5 things CEO Sundar Pichai told employees

Google parent Alphabet is consolidating its Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts. The company is merging DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company it acquired in 2014, with Google’s Brain team to form Google DeepMind. In a blog post, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, said that the combined groups will “significantly accelerate our progress in AI.” For those unaware, Google acquired DeepMind for $500 million. Google Brain was formed in 2010 as a part-time research collaboration.

Their collective accomplishments in AI include AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow, training and deploying large scale ML models. Here are the key things that Pichai announced about the consolidation.