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

810 points · 862 comments · colesantiago

  1. GodelNumbering · · focus · HN ↗
    So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner

    And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL

    Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen

    1. narrator · · focus · HN ↗
      The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists.

      I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and had should have rights. At least at Grok, Elon said he wanted an AI dedicated to the truth which is an easier target to hit than what the Google gatekeepers probably wanted. The ideological purity of a Google AI must have been a real moving target though, and retraining an AI is not an cheap or fast thing.

      1. j2kun · · focus · HN ↗
        I recommend touching grass.
      2. anon84873628 · · focus · HN ↗
        Hard to explain the departure of Timnit Gebru if that's the case. Unless you think they actually changed corporate culture so dramatically because of that event...
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