AI is taking centre stage this year and Google wants its products and services to have an AI focus with a new internal reorganization.
Sundar Pichai announced earlier today that they’re combining its hardware and Android teams to ship AI to every product under a new team called Platforms and Devices. This means we’ll see AI on everything that runs Android and ChromeOS – its smartphones, tablets, TVs, laptops, Photos, Play and Chrome.
Rick Osterloh will lead this new team as Hiroshi Lockheimer moves to run other Google and Alphabet projects. Rick was previously the SVP of devices and services while Hiroshi was the SVP of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Play and Photos. Jay Yagnik, Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google(Google AI) will join this new team.
The two SVPs alongside Sundar had been planning this reorganization and this unification will likely increase the pace of AI integration across Google’s platforms and devices by having just one leader heading one team.
“We have a really quick way to get the latest research, the latest models, from DeepMind and that will mean figuring out how we build a new application based on the output of our latest model and being able to move people around quickly to do that,” said Rick Osterloh.
Rick assures that now that Pixel and Android are under one team, they won’t alienate other Android device manufacturers. In this new reorganization, Sameer Samat will be the president of the Android ecosystem. Both Sameer and Lockheimer say that everything will be fine.
Google Gemini is already powering Samsung’s Galaxy AI with its on-device and Cloud-based processing. with features like live translate calling, generative photo editing, Note Assist that summarizes, formats and translates notes and Google Circle to Search. Google plans to ship the Circle to Search feature to other non-Samsung and non-Pixel devices later this year probably before launching Android 15 in October.
