DeepMind’s small army of AI researchers in Mountain View is growing

DeepMind has an office at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

DeepMind now has almost two dozen staff working out of an office at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The London-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI) lab, acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million, has formed the team in less than six months.

“I can confirm there are currently just over 20 DeepMind staff in Mountain View,” a DeepMind spokesperson told Business Insider on Wednesday. “The team there continues to hire and will grow.”

The team has been established so that DeepMind can collaborate more closely with Google. DeepMind’s researchers, for example, are helping engineers at Google to embed AI into Google Play, Ads, and Shopping.

In December 2016, Bloomberg reported that DeepMind was hiring its first overseas researcher at Googleplex after seeing a job listing on the company’s website.

At the time of the report, a DeepMind spokesperson told Business Insider: “We’re proud to already have close partnerships with many teams at Google, but we’re yet to develop an algorithm that gets rid of time zone differences.”

“So we’re hiring a small DeepMind Applied team in Mountain View to bridge the gap between Google and our team in London, helping us collaborate even more closely to bring our research breakthroughs to Google users around the world.”

DeepMind’s workforce is split into two main streams. One stream focuses on AI research while the other stream looks at applying that research to new products and services. DeepMind’s Mountain View team sits under the applied umbrella, which has also partnered with the NHS on a number of healthcare projects. It has also partnered with Google on a project that is helping the search giant to reduce the amount of electricity it uses to power the cooling units in its huge server farms.

In London, DeepMind has around 400 people in a DeepMind located across two floors of a new Google building in King’s Cross. However, that number could be expanded to 1,000 in coming years.

DeepMind’s office in Mountain View represents the company’s first overseas expansion. All of DeepMind’s fundamental research remains in London, and the company continues to collaborate with counterparts at Google Brain and elsewhere on projects of shared interest.

Prior to its formation, Yann LeCun, the head of AI research at Facebook, suggested that DeepMind was too far away from the Google “mothership” to have a significant impact.

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