Why A.I. Researchers at Google Got Desks Next to the Boss<br />Ms. Greene, who was the chief executive of the software company VMware, said she had always<br />made a point of sitting beside the top engineers because they saw the company’s future.<br />At Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, the chief executive, Sundar Pichai, now shares<br />a floor with Google Brain, a research lab dedicated to artificial intelligence.<br />thinks a lot about where people are sitting — who they can walk around<br />and have casual conversations with,” said Diane Greene, who oversees Google’s cloud computing team and sits on the board of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.<br />“It is a very significant statement that he has moved that group right next him.”<br />Google is placing big bets on the A. I.<br />being explored by researchers like Mr. Goodfellow.<br />“And a lot of these businesses are concluding that the speed of technological innovation should be the heart of everything.”<br />A year ago, the Google Brain team of mathematicians, coders<br />and hardware engineers sat in a small office building on the other side of the company’s campus.<br />It sits directly outside the office of the company’s chief executive, Patrick Byrne.
