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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

#491

Post by Zigurd »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #377
frollogaston wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.

A few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.

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

#492

Post by WarmWash »

taurath wrote: post #424
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside. Yeah he seemed too reasonable to me, relative to the fervor. Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing to catch up to the ferver that would justify their valuations and investments

Google's capex is to capture the compute purchases from the other labs. The amount they are spending on Gemini is probably shockingly low...and hence researchers leaving for better watered pastures.

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

#493

Post by MattCruikshank »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #371

Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era. There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".

Did Jeff and Sanjay pair write their resignation letter? Wow.

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

#494

Post by Zigurd »

oblio wrote: post #401
solenoid0937 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.

I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI. Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).

I believe in AGI to the extent that if what's going on between your ears isn't happening on a network of neurons, it's magic. And I also believe the idea that AGI is near is based on the emergent capabilities of LLMs. There's a chance that AGI will emerge from bigger faster better LLMs. But without a theory of when and how that will happen, I'm not counting on it.

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

#496

Post by PunchyHamster »

impulser_ wrote: post #410
oblio wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.

People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.

IBM's business is still going so I dunno what your point is

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

#497

Post by summerlight »

frollogaston wrote: post #294
GodelNumbering wrote: post #199

So, 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…

Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".

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

#498

Post by PunchyHamster »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #397
frollogaston wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.

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

AGI might be a risk but what top AI firms are doing is not really getting us closer to AGI in a meaningful way, it is pretty clear now LLM is not the way to get there

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

#499

Post by bborud »

jrflo wrote: post #412
impulser_ wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.

Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.

And yet, their search engine is enshittified beyond all belief.

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

#500

Post by frollogaston »

summerlight wrote: post #497
frollogaston wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circu…

I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.
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