Google rebrands its Google Research Division as Google AI

With Google’s I/O developer conference being organized recently, the company has rebranded the whole of Google’s Research Division as Google AI.

The move signals how Google has increasingly focused a lot of its R&D on breaking new ground across the many facets of AI specifically, from technologies like computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks, through to applications across virtually any and every business that Google currently and potentially touches.

"From computer vision to healthcare research to AutoML, we have increasingly put emphasis on implementing machine learning techniques in nearly everything we do at Google," writes Google’s Christian Howard in a post announcing the change. "Our research has been core to the development and integration of these systems into Google products and platforms. To better reflect this commitment, we’re unifying our efforts under "Google AI", which encompasses all the state-of-the-art research happening across Google."

According to media reports, Google seems to imply that further non-AI research will also be housed in the new AI hub, although it’s not really clear how much support and interest there will be for more work in other fields, or if everything now will need to have an AI angle to be progressed.

In the current race for talent and more business opportunities in the next generation of computing, Google is keeping its eye on the AI prize.

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