Google’s VP of Labs and former co-CEO of Salesforce are starting a new AI company

The AI news keeps on coming today.

Clay Bavor, Google’s Vice President of Labs, and Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce, have announced that they are starting a new AI company. The two took to LinkedIn today to make the announcement, confirming that Bavor was leaving the tech giant after an 18-year career.

In his post on LinkedIn, Bavor said that the new company is being formed to use AI in order to “solve some of the most important problems in business.”

Bret and I have known each other since our early days at Google, and I have always admired his keen product sense and entrepreneurial spirit, his technical chops, and, above all, his character and integrity. We share an obsession with recent advances in AI, and we’re excited to build a new company to apply AI to solve some of the most important problems in business.

Megan Quinn, an angel investor and board director for Handshake, Niantic, Pendo, and ROVR, took to Twitter to congratulate the pair on their venture.

Bavor said that they will begin work on the new company in March and that, until then, he will be “focusing on transitioning my teams and projects, and wrapping things up properly at Google.” Bavor’s list of work at the company includes Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Project Starline, and other virtual-reality and mixed-reality projects.

Today’s announcement comes as the AI wars continue to heat up. In this week alone, both Google and Microsoft announced advancements in technology to power new experiences in search. Microsoft specifically announced that it would be integrating OpenAI’s technology into Bing and Edge. Google, on the other hand, showed off new immersive map experiences powered by AI.

Google still has yet to release Bard, its competitor to ChatGPT, to the public, but the company says that it should be rolling out in the coming weeks.