April

1 events

Editors' summary

The idea of the AI agent arrives

On 20 April, Google merged Google Brain and DeepMind to form Google DeepMind. It folded a lab that had long kept its independence into the company's product fight, two months after Bard's stumble.

Meanwhile, Auto-GPT, released by an independent developer, grew explosively on GitHub. Give it a goal and it broke the work into tasks and ran them; the word "agent" entered common use that month. It was not yet practical, but the direction it pointed was unmistakable.

Mistral AI was founded in France, the start of a European counter-offensive. At the end of the month, Italy lifted its suspension of ChatGPT.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record1 events

20
GovernanceGoogle / Demis Hassabis / Jeff Dean / Sundar Pichai
Google merges Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind
Alphabet announced that it was merging Google Brain and DeepMind into a single unit, Google DeepMind, with DeepMind's Demis Hassabis as CEO and Jeff Dean, who had led Brain, becoming chief scientist; Zoubin Ghahramani, Eli Collins, and Koray Kavukcuoglu joined the leadership team. Sundar Pichai framed it as ensuring "bold and responsible development of general AI." It brought together two research organizations with distinct cultures — Brain, which produced the Transformer, and DeepMind, which produced AlphaGo and AlphaFold — and ended the independence DeepMind had kept since its 2014 acquisition. The reorganization came as duplicated and scattered effort became a liability in responding to ChatGPT. Gemini came out of the combined group.

↑ 2023

Google merges Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind