Google DeepMind Shifts From Research Lab to AI Product Factory

Over one week in mid-May, two companies announced artificial intelligence products built using one of Google’s seminal breakthroughs. On May 13, OpenAI Inc. introduced a new version of the model that underpins ChatGPT, its wildly popular chatbot that relies on a technology known as a transformer that Google first described in a research paper in 2017. The next day, Google announced AI Overviews, a product that offers responses to some searches with answers written by its own system based on the same technology.

The Overviews launch didn’t go well. The feature began offering embarrassing suggestions, such as advising people to ...