Google Announces a Major AI-Flavored Reorg

Amidst an employee uprising over an AI and cloud computing deal with Israel, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a massive reorganization that will better position the online giant to move more quickly and leverage its AI assets across its platforms and devices.

“I want to share some changes we’re making across the company to simplify decisions and help us work better and faster,” Pichai writes in a letter to employees. “These changes continue the work we’ve done over the past year to simplify our structure and improve velocity and execution — such as bringing together the Brain team in Google Research with teams in DeepMind, which helped accelerate our Gemini models; unifying our ML infrastructure and ML developer teams to enable faster decisions, smarter compute allocation, and a better customer experience; and bringing our Search teams under one leader.”

First up, Google is consolidating the teams that build its AI models across Research and Google DeepMind into a single team at DeepMind. This move simplifies the development of compute-intensive model building in one place and gives Google Research a “mandate to continue investing in … quantum, foundational ML and algorithms, and applied science and society, three key areas that tie directly to Google’s mission.”

Pichai also moved Google’s Responsible AI teams into Deepmind so they can work more closely with those building and scaling its AI models. This will “create clearer responsibility and accountability at every level as we build and deploy, and strengthen the feedback loop between models, products, and users,” he says.

Next, Pichai has created a new Platforms & Devices team that combines the previously separate Devices and Services PA (DSPA) and Platforms & Ecosystems (P&E) teams with the Google Research teams responsible for computational photography and on-device intelligence. This team will be led by Rick Osterloh, whose affable on-stage presence has been a highlight of many recent Google events. This will speed up decision-making, Pichai notes, help it deliver better products faster, and bring innovations to partners more quickly. (More on this below.)

Finally, Pichai notes that Google needs to be more focused on how it “works, collaborates, discusses, and even disagrees.”

“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action,” he says. “That’s important to preserve. But ultimately, we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.”

That last bit refers to a controversial episode this week in which some Google employees protested a joint contract with Amazon to provide AI and cloud services to the Israeli government, forcing Pichai to fire 28 of them after they physically prevented other employees from accessing their workplaces.

But what I’m mostly concerned about here is that new Platforms & Devices team. Under this new structure, Pichai says Google will “reimagine” its computing platforms for the next decade. And he specifically mentions Android, ChromeOS, Chrome, Search, Photos, and the Pixel family of hardware products. Previously, Android and Pixel were separate.

This type of “full stack” organization isn’t that unique—it’s what Apple does, after all, and what Microsoft is still trying to do with Surface—but it could help Google be more nimble in an era in which technical advances are suddenly happening much more rapidly. A single team, advancing hardware and software in tandem, can be more efficient than two separate teams. At least in theory.

That said, this integration is sure to raise some eyebrows with Google’s partners, especially the Android hardware makers that complete with Pixel and might rightfully be worried about Google giving unfair advantages to its own devices. But Osterloh said separately that Android and Pixel will remain “distinct teams,” with Sameer Samat reporting to him directly and leading an Android ecosystem team. In that role, Samat replaces Hiroshi Lockheimer, who will advise during the transition and then work on “some new projects across Alphabet.”