Google Confirms Intent to Establish AI Team in China

Google is not sitting idle while China’s IT giants increase their investments in the AI sector. At the media event held in Tokyo, Jeff Dean, the director of Google Brain, said the company is establishing its AI team in China, and is mainly recruiting in Beijing and Shanghai.

This is the first time Google has publicly stated its intent to build a Chinese AI team.

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Earlier media reports said a team focused on machine learning was being set up in Beijing, and that recruitment had begun. Jobs included machine learning researcher, machine learning chief technology officer, cloud machine learning product manager and machine learning software engineer.

“We will invest more in China and think about how we can effectively participate in the Chinese market,” Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, said in a recent interview

Some analysts said Google China’s AI team was not a surprise, “Just like Microsoft Research Asia, it is mainly about research and development. There may not be products landing in China in the future.”

It is also Google’s most recent attempt to return to China for artificial intelligence entrances after the “AI first” strategy.

Previously, Bloomberg reported Google tried to return to China seven years after its exit. This time, it no longer relied on searching engine technology, but TensorFlow, an artificial intelligence system development framework, developed by Google Brain.

In September, Google held promotional conferences in cities across China and introduced its open source AI software library TensorFlow, which is used in AI technology development by such companies as Airbnb, eBay and Snapchat.