Google DeepMind Shifts From Research Lab to AI Product Factory
The company combined its two AI labs to develop commercial services, a move that could undermine its long-running strength in foundational research.
Demis Hassabis, chief executive officer of DeepMind Technologies.
Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/BloombergOver one week in mid-May, two companies announced artificial intelligence products built using one of Google’s seminal breakthroughs. On May 13, OpenAI Inc. introduced a new version of the model that underpins ChatGPT, its wildly popular chatbot that relies on a technology known as a transformer that Google first described in a research paper in 2017. The next day, Google announced AI Overviews, a product that offers responses to some searches with answers written by its own system based on the same technology.
The Overviews launch didn’t go well. The feature began offering embarrassing suggestions, such as advising people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza. The next week, Google implemented new guardrails, describing them in part as a way to prevent Overviews from inadvertently presenting satirical content as fact. It was a bad look for a company that could use a win in AI. Many people across tech already think products such as ChatGPT have the potential to eliminate the need for Google Search, which accounts for the majority of the company’s revenue, so the stakes can seem existential.