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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

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?

> put the effort into keeping Search profitable The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.

If they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely useful part of search at that point (widgets like the dictionary) was the final nail in the coffin for me at least.

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

#803

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…

Ever since Google became an adCompany, it rarely innovated anymore.

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

#804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is your position on middle of the road pain and suffering?

There's an app for that.

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

#805
post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trump is indeed effective at pillaging. The interesting thing is that Yuri explained and predicted (!) this in the 1980s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw

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

#806
post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Huh, an AGI that runs on deez..

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

#807

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.

What? psychologists are for that (or drugs and alcohol).

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

#808
post #95

I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this. OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people wh…

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.

> It would be stock price suicide if anything even remotely happened with Google.

aka they're dead in the water.

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

#809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? But only if you give it a tool it can use - which brings you back to Google (or Bing)

Anyone can leverage common crawl and/or run their own crawler, to do so isn’t novel. https://commoncrawl.org/

Sure, I was just pointing at the fact that the question "And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?" has a two-part answer:

1) training data (common crawl as one example web data source), and

2) live data optionally retrieved at runtime.

My comment was about 2), and that part runs via a search engine (Bing?), at least if you look at how ChatGPT does it.

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

#810
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.

The MacBooks certainly got a lot better and more usable. Anyone remember the touchpad MBP with no physical escape key and the butterfly keyboard? (Respect to many of Ive’s great legacy though)

I thought the touch bar was cool and useful, I’ve always remapped caps lock to escape though.

Would like one with all the current physical keys plus a Touch Bar that you could do cool stuff with.

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