Thread

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

810 points · 862 comments · colesantiago

xtreak29 · 1785946536 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724
> Announcing Discovery Loop!
> I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
1. [deleted] · 1785947307 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
2. manvel_hn · 1785947675 · focus · HN ↗
  It's quite interesting that those events are happening at the same moment. I wonder whether they are related
  1. aix1 · 1785947966 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. lostdog · 1785949829 · focus · HN ↗
    Some do-nothing EVP probably just got control over the Gemini org
3. jgilias · 1785947845 · focus · HN ↗
  Is it _that_ Jeff Dean?
  <a href="https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts
  1. pdpi · 1785949477 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, him.
  2. 12345hn6789 · 1785950454 · focus · HN ↗
    "Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points."
    ahahah golden.
    Will be following their journey
  3. judah · 1785951633 · focus · HN ↗
    > When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE)
    Uh oh...
  4. AceJohnny2 · 1785960600 · focus · HN ↗
    Fun fact: the Jeff Dean Facts was started by Kenton Varda (kentonv around here [1]), as a joke inside Google. He has expressed regret that it eclipsed Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom Jeff Dean basically did pair-programming with.
    [1] also known for open-sourcing ProtoBufs v2, creating CapnProto and Sandstorm, and commenting on the recent Cloudflare OS post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996
4. throwaw12 · 1785948047 · focus · HN ↗
  Is Jeff also leaving Google?
  I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team
  1. compiler-guy · 1785948418 · focus · HN ↗
    They are leaving Google, but Google is an investor in the new company. So a split, but not exactly a divorce. Or something.
  2. colesantiago · 1785948450 · focus · HN ↗
    > I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team
    This is probably the only time some prominent VCs would be active during August, only for Jeff Dean & Co's company.
    I can see them now frantically negotiating, responding and firing off emails right now during their holidays to get an allocation in Jeff's new company.
  3. tcp_handshaker · 1785949048 · focus · HN ↗
    Would love to hear the pitch: We never had the lead in AI and now definitely lost it, despite the gazillions dollars and engineering resources of Google, but now will be different?
5. stefan_ · 1785948734 · focus · HN ↗
  Turns out you can't pay em as much as VC will, haha
  1. dominotw · 1785949494 · focus · HN ↗
    its a public benefit corp
6. jcfrei · 1785949340 · focus · HN ↗
  I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to much more data: Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments - and so on. And they need the data in much higher fidelity than you can currently access. If we just feed AI with all the knowledge we've acquired it's much harder for it to become smarter than us - it basically needs it's own eyes, ears, nose and so on.
  1. Oras · 1785953188 · focus · HN ↗
    > Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available
    I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better
  2. tomnicholas1 · 1785956314 · focus · HN ↗
    > Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments
    There are PetaBytes of important scientific data locked in archival file formats. The first step is to make this efficiently readable.
    <a href="https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr" rel="nofollow">https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659254">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659254
7. mosura · 1785951113 · focus · HN ↗
  Is the subtext that Demis was trying to block what Dean etc wanted to do and so they had to leave Google in order to do it?

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