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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

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"

All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.

Is it failing ? Take a look at the stock price

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

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote the good old parts

And Tensorflow?

That was supposedly 17 years ago, so I was counting it in the good old. It was cutting-edge at the time, then years later PyTorch ate its lunch, which they eventually admitted with TF 2.0.

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

#703

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…

This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en

I can see this as a screenplay for one of the KRAZAM[0] videos.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@KRAZAM

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

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.

Is it failing ? Take a look at the stock price

Their stock price won’t matter once OpenAI launches the paperclippers.

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

#705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but it should still have the same technical availability level

What makes you think it doesn't?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192851

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

#706
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.

> as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet

IS that a promotion or demotion ?

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

#709
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…

> and has been given the newly created title of Alphabet Chief Scientist. Are these just face-saving titles, or does he still have any real influence over Google/DeepMind's pursuit of AGI?

Alphabet Chief Scientist doesnt sound like a demotion / lack of influence to me but who knows. We're all just speculating here.

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

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is roughly how i've been reading their approach, but i wonder when/if this changes. what actually makes them start caring about having the most capable model? maybe nothing. i suppose they could be happy in a world where they (a) are still the agents' preferred search index and (b) own or produce a good percentage of the hardware that anthropic and openai run on.

> i suppose they could be happy in a world where they (a) are still the agents' preferred search index and (b) own or produce a good percentage of the hardware that anthropic and openai run on.

If the goal is to maximize share price (which it is) this is probably the safest approach. Why do they have to keep chasing developing the best model when they can

a) charge everyone for the cloud infra

b) have a "good enough" experience for normal consumers

Their current setup will be worth trillions. Already is. Let anthropic get paid for the most expensive queries while they get a bill from Google for their cloud/TPU use. GCP grew 82% YOY with 24B revenue and improving margins. So GCP became a 100B business. Anyone doubts it's gonna double in less than 5 years? Gemini just needs to be good enough for normal folks who want personal agents for everyday use. I don't think Google has to compete with Anthropic on making the best agentic programming model.

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