Alphabet is merging Google Brain, part of the research division, and DeepMind as the company races to compete in artificial intelligence. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/20/alphabet-merges-ai-focused-groups-deepmind-and-google-research.html I ain't so sure this will even work. It's too little too late, at least from an investor's point of view. As you might remember, DeepMind was the creator of the AlphaGo that beat the world champion of Go back in 2016. Had they been working on more productive projects than teaching AI to beat some anachronistic quirky games, maybe they would be in a position far more advanced than OpenAI today. What a shame.
I note this in the article:- "DeepMind has been able to operate separately from Google’s core research, enabling it to move quicker on breakthroughs such as AlphaFold, which can predict 3D models of protein structures." This stuff is way above my paygrade to comment about what they should have done in the past or what they should do now or the future.
Shades of Xerox and their Palo Alto Research Center which created most of the 1990s tech (in the mid 1970s) but the leaders of Xerox decided it was not in their interest to pursue. History repeats again. Xerox PARC had the eventual founders of Adobe, 3Com and the original Object Oriented language to create visual OSes which was eventually stolen by Jobs & Gates.
Well, they might have developed it, but they didn't know what the hell they made or what it could be used for. Tragicomic for sure.