It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet.
The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet.
The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
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. Hassabis is now just "Chair" of DeepMind, and has been given the newly created title of Alphabet Chief Scientist. Are these just face-saving titles, or does he still have any real influence over Google/DeepMind's pursuit of AGI?
Shane Legg remains as DeepMind "Chief AGI Scientist", but I wonder if the DeepMind founding mission of creating AGI is really intact, or if he will be next to go. Has DeepMind just become the Gemini division?
I just found out that David Silver, DeepMind's RL-expert, already left in february, to create a startup "Ineffible Intelligence" focusing on RL-based continual learning.
CEO of <thing> at Google (not Alphabet) was always an informal title. There is no CEO of Cloud, CEO of YouTube, or CEO of DeepMind within Google internally -- it's always been an SVP role.
> Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside.
Yeah he seemed too reasonable to me, relative to the fervor. Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing to catch up to the ferver that would justify their valuations and investments
> Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing
I don't get the impression from interviews that Kavukcuoglu is that guy - he seems like a safe pair of hands, but not someone that is on a mission.
OTOH I don't even think this is the right race to be in.
Probably not going to happen, but I'd love to see Isomorphic Labs separate from Alphabet with Hassabis still as CEO. He's too pure minded to be at company like Google.
Google's capex is to capture the compute purchases from the other labs. The amount they are spending on Gemini is probably shockingly low...and hence researchers leaving for better watered pastures.
this is roughly how i've been reading their approach, but i wonder when/if this changes. what actually makes them start caring about having the most capable model? maybe nothing. i suppose they could be happy in a world where they (a) are still the agents' preferred search index and (b) own or produce a good percentage of the hardware that anthropic and openai run on.
I’ve heard the pay at deep mind is low and people are complaining about it
Same thing happened to Yan LeCun.
Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.
Inevitably, this will lead to Sundar Pichai replacement. I see nothing less. The sooner the better. I can't even tell what Google's focus is, is there any even?
I guess his big bet on world models didn’t pay off quickly enough
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 couple years, they'll be back in a lucrative aquihire.
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)
Jony Ive wanted to chop down all the trees at De Anza Community College for something like 11 million dollars for an Apple event. There's a lot of ways he was demanding in the wrong ways for Apple
Man, I'd never heard that story, so I verified it. Turns out it was about two dozen trees and 25 million dollars, just to put up a big tent for an Apple launch event. (Yes, the trees were removed.) What a tool, he just lost my respect.
> Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple.
The position that I have rather often read on the internet is: Jonathan Ive did very good work at Apple as long as there was a counterpart who could steer his creative vision. This counterpart was of course Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs died, there wasn't such a counterpart anymore, so Ive's work for Apple got much worse.
> So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.
Who knows? Pure speculation? You can also say if Jobs was still around they could have 10x-ed it even further?
Apple car could have been a thing? Apple could have been way ahead and actually competing in AI and data centers? Who knows what else Jobs could have came up with?
Not enough to make an obvious dent perhaps. Nobody says Cook-era the same way they say Ballmer-era.
Like Ive? So you mean it’s good for Google?
> It's like Apple losing Ive in a way.
Are you sure we should compare it like this? Not sure it implies what you think it does...
Tell us what we’re missing.
The other commenter said it, quoting "Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple."
So the parent comment would imply that losing Dean is a good thing for Google, which is way less likely here.