In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind for £400 million. This makes DeepMind a subsidiary of Google, but it still maintains a relatively independent operation. This also means that DeepMind can obtain Google’s technical and resource support, and can also carry out its own research and exploration.

AlphaGo developed by DeepMind defeated the famous Go player Li Shishi in 2016, which also made DeepMind famous in one fell swoop and became a recognized leader in the AI ​​​​industry. In 2020, the AlphaFold program developed by DeepMind performed well in the CASP13 competition and successfully solved many protein folding problems in biology.

It may be that DeepMind is too independent. Although Google and DeepMind are both companies with important influence in the field of AI, and they have made great achievements in research and application in the field of AI, the two companies do not have any very close cooperation. DeepMind Just provide some technologies to help Google improve products and services (for example: DeepMind helped Google optimize the energy consumption and efficiency of data centers in 2016, improving Google’s sustainability), to some extent they are more competitive relationship.

A few days ago, according to reports from foreign media The Information, Google and DeepMind will temporarily put aside the long-term competition between the two and join forces to deal with a common “enemy” – OpenAI.

This collaboration between Google and DeepMind is known internally as Gemini (Gemini), headed by Google Brain’s Jeff Dean, who is in charge of technology, and strives to develop a model that can rival GPT-4.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, the AI ​​​​field can be said to have been completely reshuffled. Both Google and DeepMind have realized that they have fallen behind OpenAI. As Microsoft integrated GPT-4 into tools such as Bing, Edge and Office, it has accelerated AI tools. popularization and evolution.

Not only is there direct competition from OpenAI’s products, but engineers and researchers from Google and DeepMind have also lost a lot. Jacob Devlin, an AI engineer who published the paper “BERT: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding” and laid the foundation for large language models such as GPT, left Google in January this year and switched to OpenAI.

Previously, Bard, which Google hastily launched under the pressure of its opponents, accidentally overturned during the demonstration, causing Alphabet’s stock price to plummet. Even though it has been opened for testing, the functions that Bard can achieve are far less than ChatGPT.

With the cooperation between Google and DeepMind, and their foundation and resources in the field of AI, we may see the results of Gemini in a few months at the earliest. According to Google’s “self-cutting knife” tradition, will the Bard project be cut off after the birth of Gemini? How far will OpenAI evolve in a few months?