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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

#831

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…

Did all these names were huge before joining Google, and Google used their extraordinary hiring skills to get them? Or a whole bunch of them had challenging problems to solve and ample resources at their disposal to become huge?

To me it is good thing in either case. Extraordinary people are leaving to make even faster research and development. A lot of talent in Google hitherto unnamed is going to get chance to shine.

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

#833

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.

So it hasn't innovated since Oct of 2000? (when AdWords launched)

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

#834

Does anyone else feel something’s off about sundar? I feel google has become evil. I had my phone and laptop stolen and did not have 2fa on but Google still locked me out. That’s stupid.

When a powerful group removes "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct it's pretty clear where things are headed.

Reminds me of when that one verse was removed from Psalm 145.

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

#835
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly…

You clearly haven't spent much time around young adults. I work with college students a fair amount and they use chatbots for 100% of their questions, including the ones you listed. And much like google got a rich data trove from user's searches, OpenAI is getting an even richer trove from chatbot chats.

I would actually recommend using a LLM over normal search for that sort of thing, because SEO has ruined those high intent phrases. The AI equivalent of SEO is also a problem there, but it's so much less prevalent.

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

#836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was inspiring watching the Gemini 3 pro team launch the model and bike away into the sunset never to launch anything again

Its been inspiring to use it and know that I dont really need much more for all my intents and purposes.

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

#837

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't be the only person who never finds these made up dialogues funny, right?

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

#838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really expecting Google to finesse this - not competing head-on with OpenAI and Anthropic to see who can build the largest LLM, but instead being content with an extremely capable Gemini 3.6, good enough to meet their own needs, and putting maximum effort into "more than just an LLM" AGI which would then eclipse OpenAI and Anthropic. Instead, it seems Pichai has fumbled what they had with DeepMind, and they'll…

This race was never going to get to AGI, at Google or anywhere else, and it appears that Google knows that.

Why do you say that?

At least Hassabis has an understanding that AGI will require more than an LLM, and understands some of what is missing. He has never spoken publicly about any vision of what an AGI architecture would look like, other than requiring some more "Transformer-level" breakthroughs, so it seems hard to say that he would have failed, other than his 2030 projection seeming unrealistic.

My only criticism of his AGI direction was that he has talked about retaining an LLM as a component of that, but it's hard to tell if that is/was just short-term pragmatism, and a product-based path, or if he really believed this was the best direction. On the face of it having a pre-trained LLM at the heart of an attempt to build a human brain (build true AGI) is an admission you have failed, since if you build a powerful enough (human level) learning architecture it would be able to learn language for itself, not need to have it baked-in. If your version of AGI is not capable of learning language, then what else is it incapable of learning? It would certainly reflect sub-human rather than super-human capability.

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

#839

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…

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

It was always benchmaxxed

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

#840

Does anyone else feel something’s off about sundar? I feel google has become evil. I had my phone and laptop stolen and did not have 2fa on but Google still locked me out. That’s stupid.

Off in the sense that he shouldn’t be running the company?
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