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. 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. 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.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.