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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

#791

Post by galangalalgol »

rob74 wrote: post #752
Bendy wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminded me of a bit from the GOAT political comedy Yes, Prime Minister: "But he's the Prime Minister!" "Indeed he is Bernard. He has his own car, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life. What more does he want?" "I think he wants to govern Britain." "Well stop him, Bernard!"

This is indeed what the current US administration is failing at: keeping Trump from governing the US...

I would not have chosen the word governing for that sentence but I'm not sure what fits best. Plundering, pillaging, gutting, ransacking, Rick rolling, despoilng, or perhaps molesting.

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

#793

Post by ozgrakkurt »

egillie wrote: post #589
squidbeak wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.

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"

It is pretty surprising if you see this as “pretty much everyone has figured out the way to success on any field”. Our way of seeing life is really bizzare

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

#794

Post by rockskon »

astrange wrote: post #725
rockskon wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time it would've been unthinkable for Google search to become awful and nearly worthless due, in large part, by Google's discretionary choices. Related - interns these days don't seem to have any particular preference for using Google for finding information...

Google search is bad because there aren't any websites anymore. It's not really possible for it to be good.

That's for multiple reasons - many of them directly being Google's fault with intentional choices made towards this end.

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

#795

Post by galangalalgol »

zarzavat wrote: post #619
egillie wrote: post #589

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 Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.

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

#796

Post by rockskon »

xnx wrote: post #732
rockskon wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing because it's the default on their web browsers they've used in college and work. But moreso - whatever the default is what they use. They have zero attachment to Google.

Bing shows no signs of marketshare growth: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

I noticed that website doesn't show the absolute numbers involved in search engine use.

And you ignored the part where I said "they use the default".

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

#797

Post by sumeno »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #737
sheeshkebab wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence? It seems people working on it never had kids and just want to compensate for that. It’s a really horrible thing to try to “solve”.

I think death, and most extreme pain/suffering should be optional. Superintelligence, if done safely, lets us solve most of our problems.

The vast majority of pain and suffering in the world is already entirely optional, but as people we allow it to exist. How is another computer going to fix that?

It is far more likely that whoever controls a super intelligence uses it to gain more power and inflict far more suffering

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

#798

Post by conception »

ethbr1 wrote: post #757
utopcell wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a time when a tweet was 140 characters.

140 characters was likely more efficient, in terms of forcing people to focus their thoughts. But it was unpopular, in that people don't like mental effort.

No people just posted around it (1/36).

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

#799

Post by maeln »

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…

To be fair, I think it's pretty hard as an AI company to secure your top worker right now unless you have a significant equity compensation. Once your name is known, and you can say you are/were "top AI researcher at OpenAI/Google/Anthropic", you can probably just make you own company and raise enough money that even if the company fails, you will probably make more off of it than what you would have at your previous place of employment.

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

#800

Post by justanotherjoe »

moscoe wrote: post #490
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…

I guess his big bet on world models didn’t pay off quickly enough

I think it's more than that. I made prediction in earlier 2024 that the main players of AI will stick with transformers while second class players will want to transcend it. The difference is admittedly a bit subtle but ai researchers would get it. I wrote it with mamba in mind back then, but google was still trying to come up with the 'next transformers' and one that can remember using weights and all that stuffs. You can say the same abt lecun's and ilya's now.

My main reasoning was that transformers was the lightning in a bottle and the best work is in extending it instead of transcending it, which requires you to capture another lightning . Which to me appears to miss the assignment. OpenAI, Antrophic, they understand this intimately. Google on the other hand, fell victim to their own ambition.

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