Alphabet Merges AI Units Google Brain And DeepMind To Take On Rival

Google's parent company Alphabet merges two of its prominent artificial intelligence (AI) units, Google Brain and DeepMind to take on Microsoft's OpenAI's ChatGPT. Google wants to remain at par with its arch rival in the rapidly evolving AI landscape, as per a Business Today report.

In February, Alphabet launched its own chatbot, Bard to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, but it failed to impress the netizens. During the promotional video the chatbot provided inaccurate information and company lost nearly $100 billion.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will lead the newly formed division, which will focus on the "bold and responsible development of general AI," according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. In a blog post on Thursday, Pichai emphasised the importance of this step in advancing the company's research capabilities and ensuring its continued leadership in the field of AI.

The merged teams have already delivered several high-profile projects, including the transformer, a technology that forms the basis of some of OpenAI's own work. Moving forward the merged teams will prioritise the development of 'multi-modal' AI, which is similar to OpenAI's most recent model, ChatGPT-4.

This type of AI is advanced enough to generate new content by responding to not only text prompts but also image inputs.

Despite Google's dominant position in the search market, with a share of over 80%, Wall Street is concerned that Alphabet could fall behind Microsoft in the AI race. OpenAI, which is funded by Microsoft, provides the technology behind the updated Bing search engine.