Merging Two Ace Research Teams to Meet a Belated Sense of Crisis
After ChatGPT’s release, Google was reported internally to have triggered a "code red"-level emergency response mechanism, as the generative conversational product was seen as possibly posing a fundamental threat to the company’s most core search-advertising business. Pichai thereafter directed the formal merger of the two top research teams of Google Brain and DeepMind, previously operating independently with sometimes overlapping and competing research directions, into the unified "Google DeepMind," an organizational adjustment widely read as a key step in Google’s attempt to concentrate its forces and speed its catching up with the industry’s competitive pace.