Thread

1. tosh · 1785946576 · focus · HN ↗

   can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?

   1. colesantiago · 1785946901 · focus · HN ↗

      It is good for Demis and Google overall.

      This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era.

      Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms.

      The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.

      1. sashank_1509 · 1785947936 · focus · HN ↗

         I agree sundar will step down but I’m not sure if this means they’re grooming Demis to takeover. I suspect not, and someone else might take over.
      2. aix1 · 1785948316 · focus · HN ↗

         > this could be a path for Demis to be CEO in the future in the AI era

         His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no?

         P.S. I think his real interest is Isomorphic, and his new role will offer fewer distractions.

      3. tosh · 1785948463 · focus · HN ↗

         ty!
      4. lokar · 1785949073 · focus · HN ↗

         My impression, inside and out of G, was that Sundar (and Ruth) were about scaling down R&D expenses (as a fraction of revenue), and focusing on exploiting the monopolies.

         Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.

      5. junesix · 1785949252 · focus · HN ↗

         I don't see Demis becoming CEO. He's a scientist and researcher. He wouldn't want to be bogged down by minutiae of corporate politics, org structure, government relations, mobile hardware, etc. Chair lets him have authority to explore any path of interest without overhead of operations.
      6. JacobAsmuth · 1785950168 · focus · HN ↗

         > mobile era CEO

         He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.

      7. stevemk14ebr · 1785952759 · focus · HN ↗

         You're crazy of you think Demis is CEO of alphabet material. He's an accomplished AI researcher, Google does about 10000 other things than AI.
      8. davidpapermill · 1786001472 · focus · HN ↗

         When someone is moved to Chair at their startup it’s usually a gentle way to change leadership.

         I’d guess Google’s execs are unhappy with the way they’ve been left behind in LLMs.

         The position at Anthropic seemed to be that LLMs were not the way forward.

         They may prove to be correct over the long term, but commercially that view is “wrong”.

         It’s a divide between a research oriented and commercial point of view.

         For DeepMind, this is what happens when you take the money. Very rational to do so at the time, but it does have inevitable long term consequences.

         For Google, it’s repeating the same mistake they made before: they should be taking the long view and looking beyond the tech we have today to leapfrog their competitors. But tbh I’m not sure such a behemoth can do that (I have no idea how Steve Jobs managed to do that). They’d have been better to reallocate some of the capex to letting Demis do his thing.

         Another way of putting it: this is the opposite of “founder mode.”

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