Image: © Andreas Prott/Stock.adobe.com
Google is combining its research teams and its various product teams to speed up its AI research and bring more AI-powered features to its users.
Google is making some significant restructuring moves, by organising various product teams into a single entity while streamlining its AI development teams.
In a blogpost, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the changes are linked to the tech giant’s efforts to “simplify our structure and improve velocity and execution”.
Last year, the company combined its Google Brain team with its DeepMind team. Pichai said this combination was highly beneficial for the company’s AI research and helped with the development of its Gemini models.
“Now, to accelerate this progress, we’re going to consolidate the teams that focus on building models across Research and Google DeepMind,” Pichai said. “All of this work will now sit in Google DeepMind and scale our capacity to deliver capable AI for our users, partners and customers.
“This will simplify development by concentrating compute-intensive model building in one place and establishing single access points for PAs looking to take these models and build generative AI applications.”
Meanwhile, the company’s AI focus is influencing its other services such as Android, Chrome, Search and Photos. Google is merging its devices and services teams with its platforms and ecosystems teams into a combined Platforms and Devices group.
“Having a unified team across platforms and devices will help us deliver higher quality products and experiences for our users and partners,” Pichai said. “It will help us turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bring the best innovations to partners faster – as we did with Circle to Search with Samsung. And internally, it will also speed up decision-making.”
The new Platforms and Devices team will be led by Rick Osterloh, who said on X that he is excited to take on the new challenge and “accelerate AI innovation across the Android ecosystem”. Osterloh was previously SVP of Devices and Services at the company.
“I look forward to working with Christiano Amon and his team and increasing our strategic collaboration with Qualcomm and Snapdragon for Android, not just in mobile but across compute, XR and auto.
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