Hello and welcome to April’s special edition of Eye on A.I. Last week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that he was merging the company’s two advanced A.I. research labs, Google Brain, which operates out of the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, and the London-based DeepMind. The two groups are forming a new unit called Google DeepMind, which will be headed by DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis.
It's a logical move for Google, at a time when it finds itself in an unexpected, and potentially existential, struggle with Microsoft to see who can infuse cutting-edge generative A.I. into its product offerings the fastest. At stake is Google’s main revenue and profit-driver—its dominance of internet search—as well as a bunch of other Google product lines, including its Workspace office productivity software and its cloud computing services. But, while merging Brain and DeepMind might be a winning combination for Alphabet, we all might wind up losing.
