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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

#541

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".

Literally, I am ... I don't know what to say

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

#542
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Google put out a blog post about Gemini 4 having escaped its sandbox via 0-day exploit to then hack other companies, I unironically believe this would result in a boost to their stock price. They could really use some encouraging news about the competitiveness of their AI lab.

Yes. These corporations now run on fascist logic. (Hold up, stay with me here.) The goal isn't to right, or ethical, or principled. It's to (appear to) be strong and capable, and loud about it. You end up with horrible things happening that get cheered because they're only horrible along dimensions that don't matter anymore to the people calling the shots. Same thing for amazing developments that get crickets.

Note that I'm not calling Google "literally Hitler". I'm just saying that traditional assumptions about what's virtuous and what isn't don't apply anymore. For now, at least. If anyone wants to change that, they're going to have to be purposeful about it.

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

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I actually read this more as them scrambling because Jeff Dean is leaving? Because that is the role he is taking up

There is no way a Chief Scientist (essentially IC) role is more important than leading the whole of DeepMind, 6000 people strong, working on the most important product for the future of Alphabet. This means Demis wanted a change and to work on other things, it's not Google wanting this.

Or Sundar wanted Demis to change to work on other things.

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

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years. They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,.. You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals. I don't think Google is going anywhere.

The newest of those are 20 years old. Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.

GCP/Vertex, Firebase, Spanner, Waymo, Gemini + Nano Banana, Google Photos, TPUs, Pixel, Assistant, Google Fi, Taara...

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

#545
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…

CEO of at Google (not Alphabet) was always an informal title. There is no CEO of Cloud, CEO of YouTube, or CEO of DeepMind within Google internally -- it's always been an SVP role.

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

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally, I am ... I don't know what to say

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Maybe they enjoyed working with those people and don’t care about the status.

It wasn’t so much snarky as just bluntly rude.

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years. They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,.. You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals. I don't think Google is going anywhere.

The newest of those are 20 years old. Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.

People used to say the same thing about Microsoft with Windows you know...

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

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The newest of those are 20 years old. Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.

GCP/Vertex, Firebase, Spanner, Waymo, Gemini + Nano Banana, Google Photos, TPUs, Pixel, Assistant, Google Fi, Taara...

Most of those are also at least a decade old, and some of them are acquisitions.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The newest of those are 20 years old. Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.

GCP/Vertex, Firebase, Spanner, Waymo, Gemini + Nano Banana, Google Photos, TPUs, Pixel, Assistant, Google Fi, Taara...

Every single one of these hemorrhages money from their ad business

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

#550

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.

Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

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