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Alphabet is merging an internal Google Research team called Brain with DeepMind, a move designed to bring two groups focused on artificial intelligence closer together as the battle for AI heats up.

Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported $500 million and has until now run it as an independent unit out of the U.K. DeepMind has been one of Alphabet’s “other bets,” performing futuristic work, such as teaching computer systems to beat top-ranked players of the Chinese board game Go.

“Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in blog post Thursday.

Jeff Dean, who currently leads Google’s AI efforts, will be promoted and given the title of chief scientist at Google, reporting to Pichai. He’ll head up the “most critical and strategic” technical projects related to AI, the first of which will be a series of powerful, multimodal AI models.

The move marks Google’s latest reorganization in response to the rapid developments in AI, following OpenAI’s launch of the chatbot ChatGPT late last year. CNBC previously reported that Google reshuffled its Assistant organization to prioritize the company’s AI chatbot Bard.

“The pace of progress is now faster than ever before,” Pichai wrote. “To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly.”

DeepMind has been able to operate separately from Google’s core research, enabling it to move quicker on breakthroughs such as AlphaFold, which can predict 3D models of protein structures. The two divisions, DeepMind and Google Research, have also reportedly had tensions in the past, leading DeepMind to seek more independence. 

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will lead the development of “the most capable and responsible general AI systems,” Pichai said. That research, he added, “will help power the next generation of our products and services.” 

Brain, the Google Research team merging with DeepMind, is focused on AI and machine learning. Pichai said Google Research will continue work in areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, and responsible Al.

In addition to the blog post, Pichai sent a lengthier memo to staffers about the changes.

James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president of technology and society, will now oversee Google Research, along with his existing teams, Pichai said. Manyika will report to Dean and the changes will take place over the next few weeks, the memo said.

Here’s the text of the memo, which CNBC obtained:

Hi everyone,

We’ve been an Al-first company since 2016 because we see Al as the most significant way to
deliver on our mission. Since then, we’ve used Al to improve many of our core products, from
Search, YouTube and Gmail to the incredible camera in Pixel phones. We’ve helped businesses
and developers harness the power of Al via Google Cloud, and we’ve shown Al’s potential to
address societal issues like health and climate change.

Along the way, we’ve been lucky to have two world-class research teams leading the entire
industry forward with foundational breakthroughs that have ushered in a new era of Al.

The pace of progress is now faster than ever before. To ensure the bold and responsible
development of general Al, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems
more safely and responsibly.

This group, called Google DeepMind, will bring together part of Google Research (the Brain
team) and DeepMind. Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the
computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in Al.

As CEO of the new unit, Demis Hassabis will lead the development of our most capable and
responsible general Al systems — research that will help power the next generation of our
products and services. Jeff Dean will take on the elevated role of Google’s Chief Scientist,
reporting to me. In that capacity he’ll serve as Chief Scientist to Google Research and Google
DeepMind. Jeff will help set the future direction of our Al research and head up our most critical
and strategic technical projects related to Al — the first of which will be a series of powerful,
multi-modal Al models.

This move brings together two leading research groups in the Al field. Their collective
accomplishments in Al over the last decade span AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet,
AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and
distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training
and deploying large scale ML models.

Google DeepMind will operate as a nimble, fast-paced unit, with clear points of connection and
collaboration with Google Research and the PAs.

With this change, James Manyika will now oversee Google Research along with his existing
Tech & Society teams. Many of Research’s technological advances have shaped core products
and features across Alphabet and will continue to do so. Working closely with Jeff as Chief
Scientist, Google Research will continue its focus on fundamental and applied research across a
broad portfolio. This means cracking seemingly impossible, foundational and long-term
challenges in computer science — including in Al and ML — that benefit people’s lives around the
world, from algorithms and theory to privacy and security to quantum computing, health,
responsible Al, and more.

We’re announcing these changes today and will take the next few weeks to get the new teams
into place.

Please join me in congratulating Demis, Jeff, and James on their new roles and their continued
collaboration. The Google Research and DeepMind teams have laid the foundation that brought
us to this inflection point.

I’m so excited for the next phase of this journey the progress we’ make against our mission,
and all the ways we’ll help people reach their potential with increasingly capable and responsible
Al.

Sundar

WATCH: Google opens chatbot Bard to users

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Navan sets price range for IPO, expects market cap of up to $6.5 billion

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Navan sets price range for IPO, expects market cap of up to .5 billion

FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.

Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP

Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.

The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.

CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”

Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.

Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.

For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.

Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.

WATCH: Brex CEO on Navan partnership

We developed 'best in class' enterprise travel expense solution, says Brex CEO on Navan partnership

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Tech megacaps lose $770 billion in value as Nasdaq suffers steepest drop since April

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Tech megacaps lose 0 billion in value as Nasdaq suffers steepest drop since April

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.

Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC

Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.

With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.

After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”

Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.

The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Read more CNBC tech news

In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.

OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.

In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.

The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.

“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”

Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.

The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.

Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.

WATCH: Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.

Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.

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Govini, a defense tech startup taking on Palantir, hits $100 million in annual recurring revenue

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Govini, a defense tech startup taking on Palantir, hits 0 million in annual recurring revenue

Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.

“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”

CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.

The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.

In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.

The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.

Read more CNBC tech news

Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.

The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.

Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.

“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.

Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.

Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.

While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.

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