"And they shut it down. In 2023"
You mean they renamed it/merged it with another group that has similar freedom and focus on research
What’s the name of the other group?
Deepmind
DeepMind.
Deepmind. I'd say it's actually more reputable than Google Brain.
A decent amount of people seem to be unhappy/leaving deep-mind due to the forced focus on AI and lack of freedom currently though. Therefore the point above still stands.
As someone who worked at both Brain and DeepMind: their cultures were very different. Brain was bottom-up, open-field research whatever you want/care for. DeepMind was much more narrowly focused and massively more top-down.
The current tech giants spend a lot of money on "research," where research means optimizing parts of the product line to the 10^nth order of magnitude.
Arguably, Google Brain was one such lab. Albeit with more freedom than normal.
Which is fine, it's their money. But then they (and the broader public) shouldn't bemoan the lack of fundamental advances and a slowdown in the pace of discovery and change.