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Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

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Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#241

Post by svachalek »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #231
MikhailTal wrote: post #212

> Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads Considering these are the best stats they could find, gemini usage+general situation must be really, really bleak. High demand means nothing. A model being live is nothing to brag about. And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete

> Flash is in high demand I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?

That said though, Flash isn't it. The prices on the latest flash models put Sonnet and Terra to shame.

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#242

Post by brcmthrowaway »

mlmonkey wrote: post #189

Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs. Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays. It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.

He was a protected entity (tambram)

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#243

Post by judah »

jgilias wrote: post #60
xtreak29 wrote: post #5

https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724 > Announcing Discovery Loop! > I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of…

Is it _that_ Jeff Dean? https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts

> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE)

Uh oh...

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#244

Post by xnx »

Analemma_ wrote: post #225
xnx wrote: post #9

> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down…

For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?

Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#245

Post by erikgaas »

chasd00 wrote: post #187

Why form a "Public Benefit Corporation"? There must be some kind of access available that a regular for-profit corporation is excluded from. Politics perhaps? AI tells me PBCs can be shielded from shareholder lawsuits. Also "Founders can maintain vision control even as outside venture capital enters the cap table". Seems like a good way to spend investor dollars without consequences while maintaining control. Maybe a…

The important part is PBCs protect you from a shareholder primacy directive. Eric Ries describes it in his new book, but the example he gives is if the most evil company you know tried to buy out your company you have to do it in a normal "best practices" C corp because it is your fiduciary duty. PBC helps prevent that based on your declared mission statement. If the sale doesn't facilitate your mission then you aren't obligated to sell.

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#246

Post by CamperBob2 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #225
xnx wrote: post #9

> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down…

For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?

Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler.

Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other.

A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#247

Post by stefan_ »

dominotw wrote: post #160
stefan_ wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out you can't pay em as much as VC will, haha

its a public benefit corp

Funny how that works, so are Anthropic and OpenAI apparently. Maybe there is something we are missing here!

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#249

Post by gorn »

atonse wrote: post #109
anvuong wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Alphabet is just a holding company, what does Chief Scientist of Alphabet even mean?

It means "please, he's still here, don't let the stock plummet"

It still did.

Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

#250

Post by hyperadvanced »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #142
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no other way to describe the Gemini 3.5 pro delay than as a complete and unmitigated disaster. It's a huge company. It's unlikely there is any one person to blame (and entirely possible he has none of it). But things need to change.

I disagree. Google is one of the few parties that can monetize AI because Google has a massive moat in the form of their products: gmail, chrome, photos, search, etc... and Google already has the custom-built chips and datacenters. Google spending money on competing head to head with your LLMs is a waste of money for Google. If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both. All the in…

In retrospect this is very similar to the Apple strategy: don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency, position for novel uses of the tech but don’t build it per se. Apple probably would have benefitted in the last 4 quarters from hyping a custom model stack but it doesn’t seem that this strategy paid off to even close to 20% ROI while Apple got to hold their cash and organizational focus on their main thing
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