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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

#901

Post by VirusNewbie »

mikert89 wrote: post #779
bmitc wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How low are we talking?

Nowhere near what other ai labs are paying. Most deep mind employees make what typical Google employees make

Not true, they get paid at least a whole level (or two) above what we make. When I was discussing offers a few years ago, the GDM candidates regularly had six figure differentials even though they were the same level.

Maybe this isn't the same as the eight figure comp they'd get at Meta when they did their hiring spree, but no one thinks that's sustainable.

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

#902

Post by svachalek »

dweekly wrote: post #544
thefourthchime wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The newest of those are 20 years old. Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.

GCP/Vertex, Firebase, Spanner, Waymo, Gemini + Nano Banana, Google Photos, TPUs, Pixel, Assistant, Google Fi, Taara...

It's a lot of stuff, but with the possible exception of Waymo and the TPU, isn't this all going down in history under "also ran"?

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

#903

Post by narrator »

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…

The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists.

I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and had should have rights. At least at Grok, Elon said he wanted an AI dedicated to the truth which is an easier target to hit than what the Google gatekeepers probably wanted. The ideological purity of a Google AI must have been a real moving target though, and retraining an AI is not an cheap or fast thing.

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

#904

Post by SoftTalker »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #853
imglorp wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $work, r&d once had a retreat with a consultant to discuss why our productivity was too low per some spreadsheet. The consultant was told how everyone is in meetings all day so we all stole time from our families at night to get any work done at all. :(

Someone I know who did a lot of consulting said consulting was very easy 1. Go in and talk to employees about what is wrong 2. Tell management what the employees said without mentioning it came from the employees (so that management wouldn't dismiss it out of hand) 3. Charge a lot of money so management felt like it was very valuable feedback

4. Fix a few glitches so cost can be justified.

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

#905

Post by j2kun »

narrator wrote: post #903
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…

The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists. I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and h…

I recommend touching grass.

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

#906

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mikert89 wrote: post #900
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

the fate of the company partially rests on whether deep mind does well, you sound like an MBA

>the fate of the company partially rests on whether deep mind does well

I'm honestly not sure about that. They need a decent LLM to fight off the threat of LLMs replacing search, but I'd say that Gemini 3.6 Flash is more than good enough for that, with a smaller/cheaper model being preferred to a larger one. If you are "searching" for a proof to the Jacobian conjecture, then try Fable, and I doubt Google will miss the advertising revenue if Anthropic manage to sell Terrance Tao a pair of socks.

More to the point, DeepMind seems to have become a product division charged with building LLMs, not a blue sky research institute chasing AGI. To the extent that continued LLM improvement is important to Google, the relevant question is how much do you need to pay for a competent ML/LLM developer?

>you sound like an MBA

Well, no - techie here.

I wasn't sure if you were suggesting that DeepMind should pay more just because people developing LLMs at other companies are paid more, or because these are elite DeepMind researchers and are objectively worth more than other Google developers. My point being that it seems they are no longer being used as elite researchers - they are LLM developers. Does Meta need to pay FAANG salaries to employees that have been repurposed as data labellers?

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

#907

Post by ethbr1 »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #845
ethbr1 wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans could politically-economically deploy superintelligence safely, then we'd already have less extreme pain/suffering. Unless there are countervailing forces, it will be deployed, capital will hoard the benefits, and everyone else will be told to fuck off. I don't have faith in any of the AI labs to make hard financial decisions to deploy hypothetical future AGI in a way that's good for humanity as a whole. Th…

Capital hoards benefits because resource scarcity and cost of production are a thing Post scarcity societies would likely have entirely different dynamics

Transitioning to a post scarcity society requires broad, accessible dissemination of post scarcity production methods.

What was the first thing we did when we digitized media and therefore made it copyable at negligible per unit cost?

Spent a huge amount of time and money to artificially reimplement scarcity via DRM.

Scarcity-based capital interests (read: most) are not going to willingly give up their profit engines.

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

#908

Post by aix1 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #357
aix1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.

Isn't it "just" a matter of Jeff Dean (& co) leaving, Hassabis replacing Dean, and Kavukcuoglu replacing Hassabis ? A massive shake up for sure, but why do you see it as separate events merely timed to coincide ?

So there are two events here:

Event 1 - Jeff & co leaving.

Event 2 - Demis stepping down. DeepMind doesn't need a "chair" and "Alphabet's chief scientist" is a bullshit title that Jeff invented for himself when he moved from Google Research to GDM, to make it look like we wasn't abandoning the former for the latter.

The third change is basically ratifying the status quo, since Koray has been de factor running GDM for a while now (and directly reporting to Sundar in addition to reporting to Demis, who in turn also reported to Sundar - quite some triangle there).

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

#909

Post by sheeshkebab »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #846
sheeshkebab wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Neat. I didn't know psychologists could cure terminal cancer!

The idea that agi would help us cure all the human deceases, esp house built into our generics or developed over millions of years gotta be the top indicator of our own stupidity.

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

#910

Post by zem »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #378
brandall10 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a bit surprised that the top comments aren't discussing losing Dean, he's been a figurehead for the company for decades. It's like Apple losing Ive in a way. EDIT: "figurehead" - that's all I meant. A notable, public figure from the company who is credited with having a significant impact on its evolution. I'm not making a judgement call on his departure, or Ive's, being good or bad. That said... just give it a…

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.

not true for jeff and sanjay - they kept moving from project to project and delivering transformative results in each.
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