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
Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
541–550 of 989 posts
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#542Earlier 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.
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
#543Earlier 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.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#544Earlier 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.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#545It 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…
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#546Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#547Earlier 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.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#548Earlier 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...
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#549Earlier 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...
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#550So, 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 processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.