{"id":67216,"date":"2022-09-15T15:29:59","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T12:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=67216"},"modified":"2025-09-07T05:28:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T02:28:07","slug":"google-halves-area-120-and-shifts-group-to-ai-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/google-halves-area-120-and-shifts-group-to-ai-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Halves Area 120 and Shifts Group to AI Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google halved its experimental Area 120 division and redirected the remaining group toward AI projects. According to <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2022\/09\/14\/google-cancels-half-the-projects-at-its-internal-rd-group-area-120\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">TechCrunch<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>According to the employees who were cut, they have until the end of January 2023 to find a new role at Google.<\/p>\n<p>Area 120 was founded in 2016 as the tech giant&#8217;s internal incubator. Employees in the division could devote all of their working time to pursuing experimental ideas, rather than the standard 20%.<\/p>\n<p>Of the seven Area 120 projects that were scrapped, only one went public \u2014 a tool for creating an online store called Qaya. The other three were related to climate, and the remaining ones to AR\/VR technologies and accounting features for Sheets.<\/p>\n<p>Area 120&#8217;s developments have also been used in Google&#8217;s commercial products. Among them are Smart Replies for Android, and the GameSnacks mini-games in Android Auto and Chrome.<\/p>\n<p>In addition, the incubator&#8217;s project Aloud remains in development, a project that uses machine learning to dub YouTube videos into several languages.<\/p>\n<p>The reduction in Area 120 staff is likely linked to Google&#8217;s slower hiring. Earlier, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a pause in hiring.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cWe must think about how to minimize distractions and truly raise the bar for both product quality and performance,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2022\/07\/31\/google-ceo-to-employees-productivity-and-focus-must-improve.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">said<\/a> at a meeting with employees in August 2022.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In August, Google <a href=\"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/news\/google-forces-out-critic-of-military-ai-contract-with-israel\">forced to resign<\/a> a critic of the military AI contract with Israel.<\/p>\n<p>In May, Google&#8217;s Brain Team division unveiled Imagen, an image generator from text prompts.<\/p>\n<p>Subscribe to ForkLog&#8217;s Telegram news: <a href=\"https:\/\/t.me\/forklogAI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">ForkLog AI<\/a> \u2014 all the news from the AI world!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google halves its experimental Area 120 division and redirects the remaining group toward AI projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":67217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"1","news_style_id":"1","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[438,738],"class_list":["post-67216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-google"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"26","promo_type":"1","layout_type":"1","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67218,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67216\/revisions\/67218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}