MSN
In February, Jeff Dean, Google’s longtime head of artificial intelligence, announced a stunning policy shift to his staff: They had to hold off sharing their work with the outside world.
For years Dean had run his department like a university, encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically; they pushed out nearly 500 studies since 2019, according to Google Research’s website.
But the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT three months earlier had changed things. The San Francisco start-up kept up with Google by reading the team’s scientific papers, Dean said at the quarterly meeting for the company’s research division. Indeed, transformers — a foundational part of the latest AI tech and the T in ChatGPT — originated in a Google study.
Things had to change. Google would take advantage of its own AI discoveries, sharing papers only after the lab work had been turned into products, Dean said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information.
The policy change is part of a larger shift inside Google. Long considered the leader in AI, the tech giant has lurched into defensive mode — first to fend off a fleet of , and now to protect its core search business, stock price, and, potentially, its future, which executives have said is intertwined with AI.
In op-eds, podcasts and TV appearances, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has on AI. “On a societal scale, it can cause a lot of harm,” he warned on “60 Minutes” in April, describing how the technology could supercharge the creation of fake images and videos.
But in recent months, Google has overhauled its AI operations with the goal of launching products quickly, according to interviews with 11 current and former Google employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information.
It has lowered the bar for launching experimental AI tools to smaller groups, developing a new set of evaluation metrics and priorities in areas like fairness. It also merged Google Brain, an organization run by Dean and shaped by researchers’ interests, with DeepMind, a rival AI unit with a singular, top-down focus, to “accelerate our progress in AI,” Pichai wrote in an This new division will not be run by Dean, but by Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, a group seen by some as having a fresher, more hard-charging brand.
At a conference earlier this week, Hassabis said AI was potentially closer to than most other AI experts have predicted. “We could be just a few years, maybe … a decade away,” he said.
Google’s acceleration comes as a cacophony of voices — including notable — are calling for the AI developers to slow down, warning that the tech is developing faster than even its inventors anticipated. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of AI tech who joined Google in 2013 and recently left the company, has since gone on a media blitz escaping human control. Pichai, along with the CEOs of OpenAI and Microsoft, will meet with White House officials on Thursday, part of the administration’s ongoing effort to signal progress amid public concern, as regulators around the world discuss new rules around the technology.
Meanwhile, an AI arms race is continuing without oversight, and companies’ concerns of appearing reckless may .
