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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

#481

Post by kridsdale1 »

frollogaston wrote: post #434
VirusNewbie wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling. this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.

Only the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper. Start in a blank direct…

Your information is indeed out of date.

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

#482

Post by brokencode »

phatskat wrote: post #470
brokencode wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s over half of their business, but they do have some diversification with YouTube, Play Store, and cloud services. Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue. They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari. If search…

> AI hosting for Apple Curious to see how long that lasts - YouTube and Google Maps were fairly mainstay apps for iPhones for a while, and eventually Apple cut the Maps cord to do their own thing. I don’t know if that’s from an existential concern of “we need to eventually move Maps in-house”, but given the Google of it all I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is already at least planning on how to do the same with AI on…

That’s tough to say. So far, Apple has been very reluctant to invest in the massive infrastructure you need to run large AI models.

But if they are successful in making on-device models that work well, then you don’t really need as much cloud infrastructure.

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

#483

Post by ralph84 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #30

I 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…

Google was offering researchers the Bell Labs/Xerox PARC model of comfortable budgets and pay but capped upside. And just like with Bell Labs and Xerox PARC the inventions at Google got productized elsewhere by people chasing the uncapped upside. Google would have been happy to keep LLMs in the research lab forever and never productize any of it. ChatGPT forced their hand.

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

#484

Post by toomuchtodo »

suncemoje wrote: post #472
toomuchtodo wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone deleted a reply to this comment “And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?” they wrote and I think the question is important: LLM chatbots can crawl the web just as well as Google.

Huh? But only if you give it a tool it can use - which brings you back to Google (or Bing)

Anyone can leverage common crawl and/or run their own crawler, to do so isn’t novel.

https://commoncrawl.org/

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

#485

Post by WarmWash »

darkoob12 wrote: post #442
baron816 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly…

I actually use Claude for finding stuff and recommendations. like "Find me a decent shoe with blah blah conditions" this query now goes to LLM Chat instead of google search. I use google search to find the url of something that i know exists like find the website of a company or finding address of a store.

Now get the other 99.99% of the (tech illiterate) population to do it...

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

#486

Post by bitpush »

darkoob12 wrote: post #442
baron816 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly…

I actually use Claude for finding stuff and recommendations. like "Find me a decent shoe with blah blah conditions" this query now goes to LLM Chat instead of google search. I use google search to find the url of something that i know exists like find the website of a company or finding address of a store.

The issue is Claude is losing money serving you that, and while Google makes money serving you the same result. On top of that, you are paying Claude to get that same result.

Unless Claude adds ads, it isnt going to be sustainable for both Anthropic or you - and congrats, you've invented Google Search.

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

#487

Post by MikeTheGreat »

nsagent wrote: post #428
solenoid0937 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously. I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework

I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously, but think all the major labs and most of the academic research is not helping achieve it any serious way. The field is seriously delusional (and has been ever since GPT 3 was released). Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

Genuine question: can I ask why?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :)

I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.

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

#488

Post by busyant »

nsagent wrote: post #428
solenoid0937 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously. I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework

I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously, but think all the major labs and most of the academic research is not helping achieve it any serious way. The field is seriously delusional (and has been ever since GPT 3 was released). Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

> I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously

> I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

I have no background in CS, so apologies if this is a naive question, but what makes you take AGI seriously, but also say that LLMs are a dead end?

i.e., is there something else that you think is not a dead end?

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

#489

Post by BurningFrog »

darkoob12 wrote: post #442
baron816 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly…

I actually use Claude for finding stuff and recommendations. like "Find me a decent shoe with blah blah conditions" this query now goes to LLM Chat instead of google search. I use google search to find the url of something that i know exists like find the website of a company or finding address of a store.

Yeah, but are you getting the perfectly targeted ads that Google serves you?

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

#490

Post by moscoe »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #418
ra7 wrote: post #64

It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet. The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.

It seems there's a big shake up on the underperforming Gemini side. Before there was Shazeer (already gone) and Vinyals as co-leads, reporting to Hassabis, now Gemini comes under Kavukcuoglu reporting direct to Pichai as SVP of DeepMind. Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside. He had been CEO of DeepMind, but that position no longer exists and it seems Kavukcuoglu is now leading DeepMind with a title of SVP. Hassab…

I guess his big bet on world models didn’t pay off quickly enough
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