DeepMind is building a team in the US to work on Google products

London artificial intelligence lab DeepMind is setting up a sizeable new team in the US in a bid to increase collaboration with parent company Google.

DeepMind, bought by Google in 2014 for £400 million, is planning to hire "a couple of dozen" people at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, according to a DeepMind spokesperson.

"We're proud to already have close partnerships with many teams at Google, but we're yet to develop an algorithm that gets rid of time zone differences," the spokesperson told Business Insider.

"So we're hiring a small DeepMind Applied team in Mountain View to bridge the gap between Google and our team in London, helping us collaborate even more closely to bring our research breakthroughs to Google users around the world."

The expansion represents a significant milestone in DeepMind's journey and comes after Yann LeCun, the head of AI research at Facebook, suggested that DeepMind was too far away from the Google "mothership" to have a significant impact.

DeepMind currently employs around 400 people in a DeepMind located across two floors of a new Google building in King's Cross. However, that number could be expanded to 1,000 in coming years.

DeepMind, which already has a DeepMind for Google team, posted its first ever overseas job advert last Thursday. The role in question is an "Applied Research Scientist".

The job listing reads: "The Applied team in Mountain View will be made up of a mixture of software engineers and research scientists who work together to solve real-world problems at Google-scale."

The US DeepMind team will be given their own office on Google's sprawling California campus, Bloomberg reports.

All of DeepMind's fundamental research will remain in London, and the company will continue to collaborate with counterparts at Google Brain and elsewhere on projects of shared interest.

DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman explained at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in London this month that DeepMind's workforce is split into two main streams. One stream focuses on computer science research in the field of AI while the other stream looks at applying that research to new products and services.

The applied team has partnered with the NHS on three healthcare projects that aim to help clinicians treat their patients better. It has also partnered with Google on a project that is helping the search giant to reduce the amount of electricity it uses to power the cooling units in its huge server farms.

Suleyman, who heads the DeepMind's applied division, hinted last month that DeepMind's technology could also be used to help predict demands on the National Grid.