Google integrates AI departments

This week it was announced that Samsung is considering making Microsoft's Bing the default search engine on their Galaxy devices. Google's parent company, Alphabet, dropped 4 percent in value on the stock exchange. While Samsung's phones and tablets still use Android (Google's operating system), it's another serious wake-up call for Google to come up with something in the AI space as well.
Google is still the undisputed leader in search: 90% of searches worldwide are performed via Google. And the company is making good money because of the $76 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, 'Search' (the text ads in the search engine) accounted for $42 billion.
And although Google fears that the lucrative ads will yield much less when the search results page changes to a chat window, it cannot lag behind in the integration of AI in the search engine and in other services such as Google Docs, Sheets and Gmail. After all, Microsoft is already further advanced in this area with the integration of ChatGPT in Bing, browser Edge and Office products.

Google merges AI research units

That is why Google is merging the existing research units in the field of AI. The DeepMind units and the Brain team of Google Research will be merged into one department called Google DeepMind. The aim is to work together faster and better.
It looks like Google is now getting serious about AI. Although the company has indicated several times that it wants to deal with AI responsibly and in a controlled manner, and CEO Sundar Pichai has also expressed his concerns about AI. Google is now more or less forced by the competition to take major steps forward. One thing is certain, it will not want to introduce AI (anymore) hastily, so as not to make another blunder, like the one at the introduction of Bard.