Google Research Becomes Google AI As Machine Learning Obsession Grows

A company as big as Google has the resources to focus on a lot of different endeavors, but for Google, AI is quickly becoming one of the biggest. In addition to things like Search and Android, we've seen AI become a big initiative over at Google in recent years. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that Google has decided to re-brand its research arm as Google AI.

As of today, Google Research will be known as Google AI. The name change was announced over on the freshly re-launched Google AI Blog, which up until a few hours ago was known as the Google Research Blog. AI is expected to be a fairly big focus at this year's Google I/O conference, so the timing of this name change certainly makes a lot of sense.

"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," the company said, noting that the research it's done regarding AI has influenced many of its 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."

Not only has the Google Research Blog been re-branded, but its existing social media accounts have undergone a change as well. On top of that, the existing Google AI site has been expanded, with links to published research joining Google AI's usual news releases. Google says that old Research links will still function and redirect appropriately, and none of the previously published content has been removed.

So, in the end, this isn't a major change for Google, but it is a good indicator of where the company wants to go in the future. Even though AI has been a big initiative at Google for a while now, we can probably expect more coverage of its artificial intelligence projects moving forward. We don't have very long to wait before we hear about the latest from Google AI, as Google I/O 2018 kicks off later today.