Google Fixes AI Structural Flaw

Google might move slowly but it gets there eventually. Well, at least that’s the theory. A shake-up in the management ranks of the tech giant, unveiled on Thursday, belatedly fixes a flaw in the company’s artificial intelligence organization, one that had constrained its ability to compete with ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI.

CEO Sundar Pichai today moved the team behind Google’s Gemini AI chatbot from its search and ads unit to its DeepMind AI research team, a change announced alongside the appointment of a new search leader. You have to wonder whether the departing search leader, Prabhakar Raghavan, changed jobs because he was losing Gemini or whether Pichai took advantage of the personnel change to make a long-needed shift. Either way, the rearrangement corrects a mistake made last year, when Pichai combined Google’s two AI research efforts under DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis but didn’t give Hassabis oversight of how AI products got rolled out.