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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
#592So, 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…
This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
I remember a time when a tweet was 140 characters.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm no expert, but I heard an AGI researcher explain that if they could figure out how to create an AI with the intelligence of a squirrel, they would be closer to AGI than LLMs based AIs are.
That's to say nothing of doing it within the energy budget of a squirrel.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#594Google investing in Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat is a good result for Google. Means they are less likely to go to the competition and easier to bring them back into the fold if they do something next level.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#595[dead]
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#596[dead]
is this sarcasm ?
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
you are right. I guess what I was thinking was that google's bigness was essentially a bad capital allocation strategy, since they were lazy and not motivated by absolute return, but some combination of acceptable risk, politics, personal preferences, etc in a large management team that has seemed...disconnected for quite some time. They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability…
It's a notoriously double edged sword. When you create huge absolute return incentives, you get things like the Airtable acquisition, where everyone's sad that you built a $1.2B company because some investor at some point mistakenly thought it was an $11B company.
Yeah, that makes sense. I suppose the flip side of all of this is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have made a lot of money relative to their spending. Google is probably just trying to be more prudent. But, AI so far is a money spending contest, more than a money making one.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#598[dead]
Before Jeff Dean was a "manager", he got a
> Ph.D. in computer science from the department that would become the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[8] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.[9]
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean?#Early_life_and_educ... )
so it's not entirely undeserved. He joined Google in 1999 as the 30th employee and he, along with Sanjay Ghemawat are responsible for Google Spanner which gets about as close as engineering can come to making the CAP theorem feel irrelevant during normal operation. It's just unfortunate that Sanjay Ghemawat doesn't roll off the tongue the same way as the name Jeff Dean does.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#599[dead]
Before Jeff Dean was a "manager", he got a > Ph.D. in computer science from the department that would become the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[8] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.[9] ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean?#Early_life_and_educ... ) so it's…
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