No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar. If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?
Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
281–290 of 988 posts
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#282I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this. OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people wh…
OpenAI and Anthropic have the freedom to do absolutely insane things like negligently hack other companies. It would be stock price suicide if anything even remotely happened with Google.
They could really use some encouraging news about the competitiveness of their AI lab.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#283Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#284So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL Combined with no gemini frontier GA relea…
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#285https://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…
I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to…
I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Does everyone want AI?
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#287So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.
Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]
I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.
It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#288I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this. OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people wh…
The new paradigm is you ask the llm a question, get the answer and cutout the middle man. (yes the answer may or may not be as good as the old google result, but for the sake of the argument lets say it is), Google was in danger of simply getting their arm cut off. so they focused on scaling so they could add LLMs to the search, which they largely have. You can't offer an opus like model on something as big as search (and which is offered for 'free'), so they focused on that model, and the infrastructure to run it, because they cannot afford to lose search.
Meanwhile, they know the power of frontier models, they are working to have the infrastructure to be a huge player in them and I'm sure they will have a frontier capable model, eventually. They are playing a longer game, because they can, and I think it's going to work out very well for them.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And Gemini seems about as good as a search engine as any of the other LLMs, if you use them casually. And Google has the brand-name recognition. Right now AI companies are competing to make LLMs better at graduate-school level tasks. They all can already competently tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or when the first Led Zeppelin album was released.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#290No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar. If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?
Superstar? This Ed Zitron? "Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI." -July 29, 2024 https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548
To say that’s an outrageous amount isn’t overstating in the slightest.
Given they are already being forced to drop inference prices in an attempt to compete with Chinese providers, I don’t know if billionaire investors will be willing to hand out that much money this time around if they can’t generate enough value to break even despite the hype.