Google names new chief AI architect to advance developments

Google has been undergoing broad changes as a company since ChatGPT upended the tech industry. It merged DeepMind, a company it acquired in 2010, with Google Brain, and installed Hassabis at the helm of its AI effort.

Across the company, it’s streamlining the way teams work in an effort to speed up product development. That has meant buyouts, layoffs, and leadership changes.

“We’re entering a new phase of the AI platform shift. It will require us to also shift into a new gear as a company to ensure our products are evolving just as quickly as our models,” Pichai wrote in the memo.

In April, Google moved Josh Woodward, head of Google Labs, into the lead role at Gemini. Woodward oversaw the creation of one of the company’s hit AI products called NotebookLM, which turns text into a podcast-like show.

Google is hoping for more successes like NotebookLM. But so far, the pace of innovation on AI models has outpaced product development.

In some ways, there is no way around that. New capabilities must be created before new products can utilize them.

On the other hand, Kavukcuoglu has been working to brief people around the company on where those capabilities are likely to lead so that product developers can think ahead.

In the past, the tech industry could count on a somewhat predictable and constant rate of change, as computers got smaller and faster over time. But AI has not yet settled into a Moore’s Law-like trajectory. Advances come in spurts and have been moving incredibly fast.

If Google doesn’t invent new ways to use AI, there’s a danger its competitors will. In some ways, that is the story of ChatGPT, which used a breakthrough in AI architecture pioneered by Google’s own researchers, at a time when those researchers were encouraged to share their discoveries with the world.

Now, AI is changing the way consumers search the web, with some early adopters using ChatGPT or Perplexity as their search engines.

On Tuesday, The Verge reported the company is offering buyouts in its Search organization — the core of its business that generates the majority of the company’s revenue.

New Gemini capabilities like Project Mariner, which can autonomously control web browsers, and Astra, which can understand the physical world, show the seeds of promising new products.

It’s now the job of Pichai’s newest direct report to see that they end up powering Google’s new products.