Thread · HN Continuity

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://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby/" rel="nofollow">https://colossus.com/article/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/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 "Transformer-level" 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'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 "Reward is all you need", 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/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 "Alphabet Chief Scientist" title, it seems somewhat irrelevant, as least as far as Google'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.