The new division will be led by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis
and its setting up will ensure "bold and responsible development of
general AI", Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Thursday.
Alphabet said the teams that are being combined have delivered
a number of high-profile projects including the transformer, technology that
formed the bedrock of some of OpenAI's own work.
Going forward, the Alphabet staff will work on
"multimodal" AI, like OpenAI's latest model GPT-4, which can respond
not only to text prompts but to image inputs as well to generate new content.
Google has for decades dominated the search market, with a share of over 80
percent, but Wall Street fears that the Alphabet unit could fall behind
Microsoft Corp in the fast-moving AI race. Technology from OpenAI, funded by
Microsoft, powers the rival software maker's updated Bing search engine.
Alphabet announced the launch of Bard in February to take on
ChatGPT as well. It lost $100 billion in value on Feb. 8 after Bard shared
inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event failed to
dazzle.
Alphabet shares were up 2 percent on Thursday. Earlier this
week, it was reported that Alphabet shares fell over 4 percent in premarket
trading after a report that said South Korea's Samsung Electronics was
considering replacing Google with Microsoft-owned Bing as the default search
engine on its devices.
The report, published by the New York Times over the
weekend, underscored the growing challenges Google's $162-billion a-year search
engine business faces from Bing — a minor player that has risen in prominence
recently after the integration of the artificial intelligence tech behind
ChatGPT.
Google's reaction to the threat was "panic" as the
company earns an estimated $3 billion in annual revenue from the Samsung
contract, the report said, citing internal messages. © Reuters