Google’s AI Unit Reorganizes Product Work, Announces Changes to Gemini App Team
**Title: Google’s AI Unit Reorganizes Product Work, Announces Changes to Gemini App Team**
By Erin Woo
Source: The Information
Google DeepMind has disbanded its "product impact unit," whose goal was to incorporate DeepMind research into Google products, as it attempts to streamline the process of creating AI products, DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis told employees on Thursday.
"This move is designed to optimize and simplify our product work, model development work and [product area] engagements," Hassabis wrote in a message to employees. Employees in that unit will be moved to other teams, and its leader, Chandu Thota, will move to a new product role within Google. A new "Applied AI" team led by vice president David Thacker will now be the new point of contact for product areas working with DeepMind, Hassabis told employees.
Hassabis also announced changes to Google's consumer chatbot app, Gemini, which has struggled to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Google has hired a former Meta vice president of product, Chris Struhar, to lead product on Gemini, and is adding product teams from Google's more experimental multimodal assistant product, Astra, into Gemini. The Gemini chatbot will also now use models developed by DeepMind's main post-training teams, rather than a chatbot-specific team, according to the memo, which could lead to improvements to the Gemini chatbot.