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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

#871

Post by alfalfasprout »

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…

Sundar Pichai began the downfall of Google by most accounts. It went from an engineer driven culture to one of infighting, politics, and bureaucracy. It's telling when xooglers nowadays complain of maintenance and improvement of products being a career dead end vs. shipping new things. And there being so much empire building.

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

#872

Post by breppp »

yyaakkqq wrote: post #691
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273

I wish their deep tech teams moved as fast as the privacy violating ones.

If it's any solace the privacy violating ones are also slow

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

#873

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

sysguest wrote: post #823
galangalalgol wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...molesting? a country? ...how?

"If you are famous they let you do anything!"

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

#874

Post by alfalfasprout »

chrisXOXO wrote: post #790
nostrademons wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leaked internal Google memo "We have no moat" [1] was really prescient. It foresaw all of these proprietary models losing out to open-weight models. Entirely possible that none of the big incumbents ends up winning, economically. [1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/4/no-moat/

I would like a reassessment of that. This was 2023. I imagine the only ones filling the moat is Chinese labs, but there are other significant obststacles for even Chinese models. Even if they would become as good as their American counterparts, the distribution and inference is mostly in the ballpark of Anthropic and OpenAI. But I don’t know anything, so I would love to hear other opinions.

If anything, it's becoming more true. In the last month you already have Kimi K3 reaching competitive frontier performance (in practice, a bit behind Fable/Sol but close enough). Sure, it's a chinese model but the reality is it puts dramatic pricing pressure on the main players. And these models are now getting good enough to actually help accelerate further AI model research which would suggest the gap might close even more in the near future.

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

#875

Post by alfalfasprout »

losvedir wrote: post #462
Analemma_ wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?

I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it. Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their…

On the flipside, Apple has realized AI models are quickly becoming a commodity. By not blowing hundreds of billions in speculative capex, they get to focus on the bits that likely have higher ROI: the touchpoints with AI and how it's used.

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

#876

Post by Andrex »

DrewADesign wrote: post #608
marcuschong wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.

More like sects of a major religion. Or, a minor and incredibly expensive religion, in this case.

https://youtu.be/HTpbpxNc6c0

The more things change...

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

#877

Post by toomuchtodo »

suncemoje wrote: post #809
toomuchtodo wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, but what is the difference between crawl data and model data but decay rate? Models are trained on previous crawl data, but if an LLM provider engages a search engine to get "live data," that data isn't live but previously crawled as well (and perhaps not yet integrated into models as crawl data).

So, why would you use Google as a tool or search target when you can, in some combination, go direct to the website (or whatever the target data endpoint is) yourself as an LLM provider to retrieve the most recent data or rely on your own "hot cache" of that data that was crawled recently but said data is not stale enough warranting a live web crawl to retrieve and present to the user or AI agent? Is this capability to perform retrieval from a data source in real time not similar to an AI agent?

Broadly speaking, I'm just spitballing on the concept of "You must use a search engine for an LLM to return 'live-ish' results" as I think we're directionally headed to where that isn't the case.

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

#878

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mikert89 wrote: post #859
bmitc wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how low?

they are paying them like rank and file google employees, aside from a few star researchers

Of course it does matter what other companies are paying, but I wonder how many DeepMind employees actually deserve to be paid more than any other "rank and file" Google employee? What unique skill do they have (esp. relative to what Google are now doing), and what value are they creating?

I don't get the impression that the difference between one company succeeding to build SOTA LLMs, and another struggling, comes down to individual employees - it seems to be more about the organization itself and their ability to manage teams and projects of this type. No doubt there are a few rockstars generating huge value, such as Noam Shazeer had been, but they are the exceptions.

When DeepMind was first created, before Google acquired it, they were famous for the high salaries, especially for the UK, but this was an assemblage of the brightest and best PhDs, expected to be solving challenging research problems along the unknown path to AGI. Many of these original employees may still be there, but it seems their job and value proposition has changed - are they any more capable, or key to, helping Gemini catch up with the competition than some "rank and file" employee familiar with LLMs? And if so, why haven't they done it?

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

#879

Post by mikaraento »

nostrademons wrote: post #640
frollogaston wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.

Angular was an acquisition and isn't all that commonly used within Google. Closure was the homegrown framework that's everywhere. It is a different flavor of bad than Angular. Angular was basically "You too can make your Javascript look like HTML", Closure is "You too can make your Javascript look like Java", and nobody bothered to ask Why ? For that matter, React was "You too can make your Javascript look like Ocaml…

Though to be more charitable closure was a direct reaction to the difficulty of maintaining a huge JavaScript codebase for Gmail and static typing like Java really helped. Typescript is better but closure was miles better than raw js.

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

#880

Post by LarsDu88 »

janalsncm wrote: post #609
LarsDu88 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This move was purely to pump up SpaceX stock price at its current absurd valuation b/c Google owns something like 6% of SpaceX

By your own math, doing this would have required SpaceX stock to go up $200B just to break even, and then Google would have to liquidate it.

What do you mean? Google bought SpaceX shares when it was a tiny startup. They are probably more than 100X on their initial investment. Even with a 99% drop in SpaceX stock, Google would still be positive.

Edit. Google invested 900 million in 2015 for roughly 5% of the company which comes out to 71.5 Billion dollars at 1.45 Trillion dollar current valuation. That's an 80x increase.

I think Larry Page individually might also have a very large stake as well.

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