Thread

1. ra7 · 1785947940 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. brandall10 · 1785955304 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. vjvjvjvjghv · 1785958774 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. dannyw · 1785960072 · focus · HN ↗

            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)

         2. zem · 1786042239 · focus · HN ↗

            not true for jeff and sanjay - they kept moving from project to project and delivering transformative results in each.
      2. re-thc · 1785959657 · focus · HN ↗

         > 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...

      3. crossroadsguy · 1785959826 · focus · HN ↗

         Like Ive? So you mean it’s good for Google?
   2. HarHarVeryFunny · 1785960760 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. taurath · 1785961098 · focus · HN ↗

         > 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

         1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1785962852 · focus · HN ↗

            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.
         2. kridsdale1 · 1785964872 · focus · HN ↗

            Same thing happened to Yan LeCun.

            Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.

         3. WarmWash · 1785965643 · focus · HN ↗

            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.
         4. HarHarVeryFunny · 1785970544 · focus · HN ↗

            > 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.

      2. moscoe · 1785965576 · focus · HN ↗

         I guess his big bet on world models didn’t pay off quickly enough

         1. justanotherjoe · 1786020221 · focus · HN ↗

            I think it's more than that. I made prediction in earlier 2024 that the main players of AI will stick with transformers while second class players will want to transcend it. The difference is admittedly a bit subtle but ai researchers would get it. I wrote it with mamba in mind back then, but google was still trying to come up with the 'next transformers' and one that can remember using weights and all that stuffs. You can say the same abt lecun's and ilya's now.

            My main reasoning was that transformers was the lightning in a bottle and the best work is in extending it instead of transcending it, which requires you to capture another lightning . Which to me appears to miss the assignment. OpenAI, Antrophic, they understand this intimately. Google on the other hand, fell victim to their own ambition.

      3. Cidan · 1785972249 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. kfse · 1785986028 · focus · HN ↗

            Kamangar, Wojcicki, Mohan were all CEOs of YouTube
         2. ErikCorry · 1785986333 · focus · HN ↗

            ?? Of course there's a CEO of YouTube.
         3. cbarrick · 1785990875 · focus · HN ↗

            TK has the formal title of CEO of Cloud.

            CEO of <thing> is a layer above SVP.

            Google has many layers of management.

      4. Keyframe · 1785976519 · focus · HN ↗

         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?

         1. ulfw · 1785993419 · focus · HN ↗

            Google? Focus? Huh? Focus would be the last word that comes to mind. Honestly, ever.
      5. weatherlite · 1786003644 · focus · HN ↗

         > 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?

         Alphabet Chief Scientist doesnt sound like a demotion / lack of influence to me but who knows. We're all just speculating here.

      6. _the_inflator · 1786013567 · focus · HN ↗

         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 Google never had any public person with any charisma like Jobs, Zuck, Altman.

         1. azornathogron · 1786053847 · focus · HN ↗

            Do Zuck or Altman have charisma?

            (Jobs I'll give you.)

   3. weatherlite · 1786003518 · focus · HN ↗

      > as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet

      IS that a promotion or demotion ?

      1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1786024231 · focus · HN ↗

         To me the most significant part is that he's no longer in charge of DeepMind, the company he created, other than this "Chair" title which sounds meaningless.

         When DeepMind allowed Google to buy them, it obviously had some major immediate positives - access to compute and money - but it seems it should have been obvious that the agreement was too good to be true, that they would be allowed to continue independently on their blue sky research mission to create AGI without any external interference or pressure to create product.

         It seems that Hassabis and his DM co-founders eventually realized the mistake and tried to take DM private again starting c.2018, but of course this failed.

         <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colossus.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colossus.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;project-mario-demis-hassabis-de...

         Now Hassabis has lost control of DeepMind altogether, and it seems to me, as a total outsider, that this is the end of the DeepMind mission to create AGI, at least the Hassabis&#x2F;Legg definition of AGI as human-level general intelligence, capable of creativity and scientific discovery. Hassabis had always, until very recently, said that he believed it would take a number of additional &quot;Transformer-level&quot; breakthroughs to achieve this type of human-level AGI, while still seeing an LLM as one component of if (which to me seems an admission that the goal has failed - a true human level AGI should be able to learn language, etc, using it&#x27;s own continual learning mechanisms).

         It seems that DeepMind has now fully become the Google Gemini (LLM) division, trying to create a me-too product.

         In the early days of DeepMind, before Google, before LLMs, I remember a David Silver slide deck titled &quot;Reward is all you need&quot;, referring to RL rewards, which I never agreed with (although Rich Sutton might), but does at least reflect the independent thinking at DM, and of course RL not only gave rise to AlphaGo, but has now become central to the continued improvement of LLMs. However, notably David Silver also left DeepMind earlier this year, to found his own startup focusing on RL-based continual learning, presumably feeling that there was no longer a place for that type of research&#x2F;pursuit at DeepMind.

         Still, LLMs seem to be a destructive enough force on their own that perhaps it should be seen as a positive if research towards more powerful AGI appears to have had a major setback.

         As for the &quot;Alphabet Chief Scientist&quot; title, it seems somewhat irrelevant, as least as far as Google&#x27;s pursuit of true AGI. Hassabis is the face of beneficial AI, having been Knighted and awarded a Nobel Prize for his work, and it would be a horrendous PR move for Alphabet not to at least appear to be treating him with respect, even if in fact this does reflect him being pushed aside.

      2. anvuong · 1786036378 · focus · HN ↗

         Alphabet is only a holding company. I wonder what kind of authority he has over scientists at Google, Waymo, Deepmind, etc. Probably close to none, so a huge demotion in everything but in title and compensation.

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