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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

#931

Post by azornathogron »

_the_inflator wrote: post #769
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…

Roughly two years ago suddenly Hassabis was heavily promoted on all Google YouTube channels. It was to fight ChatGPT and promote Gemini. I think the guy does a very poor job or is simply not the right guy to appear as public figure for Gemini. At least he tried. He is a man for everything that is not filmed. Google doesn’t really have a person to give Gemini or AI a human face. And that is only consequential because…

Do Zuck or Altman have charisma?

(Jobs I'll give you.)

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

#932

Post by arthurjj »

ragall wrote: post #924
arthurjj wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc. But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

> I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. In 2015, the SRE org started project "Prod 2020", with the goal of unifying the SRE stacks and modernizing the web tools. It was quite successful. If by "web tooling" you mean the tools for producing public-facing HTML services, those were used by a surprisingly small percentage o…

> I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.

I only worked with 4-5 SREs and they all grudgingly tolerated it. What did you like about it, compared to other infra languages you've used professionally?

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

#933

Post by haldujai »

keeda wrote: post #870
haldujai wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backlog meaning RPO over 5 years. It’s not as if they would be able to collect 250B today from OpenAI and Anthropic if they were to have that compute. In any case, my point is that the SpaceX deal specifically likely has ulterior motives.

The RPO can be anywhere from 3 - 6 years, sure, but even on an annual basis that’s like a hundred billion now. It was already in the double-digit billions since before AI took off and has only been spiking since then, which tells us 1) it’s been huge for 3+ years, and 2) it’s still growing faster than they can collect it. This matches what all the other hyperscalers are doing. My point is that an ulterior motive is n…

It is very suspicious when they’re paying for GB300 more than they turn around and charge those out as a4x instances, it was announced a week before IPO and they have a 90 day exit option.

> The RPO can be anywhere from 3 - 6 years, sure, but even on an annual basis that’s like a hundred billion now.

OpenAI and Anthropic deals are mostly 5 year and Anthropic’s starts in 2027, accordingly these RPOs are sized for projected compute needs and run rate in 2027 not today.

The only way either lab could pay 1 year of RPOs today (~80B for anthropic and ~150B for OpenAI) is with a lot more debt or circular financing, the former of which is difficult in this market.

Everyone spending crazy money on capex right now says they have a crushing backlog and need more compute to protect their share price. I highly doubt the demand exists today at current prices if the big 3 hyperscalers magically had an extra 2-3GW of compute. It’s not like Anthropic and OpenAI are turning away customers offering to pay API pricing..

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

#934

Post by fuzztester »

SoftTalker wrote: post #904
brobdingnagians wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you guys forgot the most important one.

5. castrol.

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

#935

Post by fuzztester »

Melatonic wrote: post #920
adityazero wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.” so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.

Sounds like its time to schedule a meeting to talk about how you can reduce the number of meetings

Meetings all the way down ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

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

#936

Post by frollogaston »

arthurjj wrote: post #932
ragall wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. In 2015, the SRE org started project "Prod 2020", with the goal of unifying the SRE stacks and modernizing the web tools. It was quite successful. If by "web tooling" you mean the tools for producing public-facing HTML services, those were used by a surprisingly small percentage o…

> I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen. I only worked with 4-5 SREs and they all grudgingly tolerated it. What did you like about it, compared to other infra languages you've used professionally?

Every SRE I've worked with has said different things, though at the time the controversy was around Piccolo. It flip-flopped between shiny new thing vs deprecated. Then the SREs I worked with got laid off, and I started cargo-culting the Piccolo we had lying around.

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

#937

Post by [deleted] »

mikaraento wrote: post #879
nostrademons wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#938

Post by frollogaston »

ragall wrote: post #926
frollogaston wrote: post #914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why all that dynamic config stuff isn't just Python. Sure, static configs should be protos, but GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. Have heard some language purity rants involving determinism, but I don't buy it. And they keep inventing new stuff like Starlark. They need to stop.

> GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. The GCL designers made several mistakes in its design, but the worse was the lack of a versioning that would make language evolution easier, as well as interoperability between different versions. GCL2 solved some issues, mainly cleaning up the interpreter. Still, BCL is IMNSHO by far the best infra lan…

But it's almost a general-purpose language, so why not just use one? I'm still not seeing why a DSL was necessary or helpful.

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

#939

Post by VirusNewbie »

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

Right, but deepmind won't do well if they can't get TPUs, if the TPU network doesn't work, if their borg jobs aren't coming up fast enough, etc.

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

#940

Post by frollogaston »

ragall wrote: post #927
nostrademons wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Angular is not a developer tool, it's a UI framework. Closure might qualify, but it was not a general tool used by the entire company. The developer tools we're talking here are Critique, Blaze, Forge, Sigma, etc...

I counted all the above as tools in my original comment at least. And my criticism wasn't against some of those foundational tools. Like Borg is fine for what it's meant to do, but anyone deploying a frontend or backend isn't doing it directly on Borg.
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