Recently, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, announced a series of changes aimed at accelerating the growth of the company through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). These changes include consolidating different parts of Google and merging central AI teams to simplify decision-making.
As part of this move, the research groups responsible for building AI models will be merged with DeepMind, a group that was previously combined with Brain to form a new AI “super unit”. Additionally, the responsible AI groups that develop rules for developing AI safely and ethically were transferred from AI Research to DeepMind. This consolidation is expected to give more control to DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis, who is at the forefront of Google’s AI push.
Apart from that, Google is also merging its two major product units – the devices and services group and the business unit that runs Android and Chrome – under the new “Platforms and Devices” banner. This move will be headed by Rick Osterloh, who previously only oversaw hardware, while Android and Chrome team leader Hiroshi Lockheimer will continue to run other projects across the company. Sameer Samat has been promoted to “President of Android Ecosystem” and will work with all Android partners to maintain a firewall between the Pixel and Android teams.
Lastly, Google CFO Ruth Porat informed employees on the finance team that there would be a reorganization resulting in some job cuts. The message from Porat indicated that changes were being made as the company realigned priorities around AI. Overall, these changes are expected to help Google focus on building a computationally intensive model in one place and streamline decision-making to accelerate the growth of the company.
