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

This move was expected when Google shifted focus to Gemini-only.

Absolute earthquake at Deepmind the last few months...

Same day Google is rolling out layoffs.

That's..huge. Hassabis has been the most important figure of the last 15 years in AI.

Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.

"Dean and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider.:

Kinsley Gaffe: A mistake whereby a politician inadvertently says something truthful which they had not meant to reveal.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe

Jeff Dean leaving... as is Sir Demis...

What's happening?!

Have they had enough of Google?

miss me with the AGI nonsense

AI hurts ads money. It's a classic Innovators' dillema.

I guess Demis was about world models and the old talent saw the writing on the wall. Noam was a big one and this is just a continuation of that.

Don’t understand how Sundar is still running things, though.

My uninformed hypothesis: Demis was gently pushed out. Gemini, while having made major strides over the last year, continues to lag behind Anthropic and OpenAI.

Lots of talk of us being at the cusp of AGI, but how will we even know when we get there? When AGI develops a religion for itself?

So how many people from DeepMind have left now? Not looking too good for Google.

Real next chapters:

1) Repair search that had been broken by AI initiatives.

2) Include less invasive AI with ads for those that need to be spoon fed.

3) Pretend to work on AGI and data centers in space.

4) Sell shovels and TPUs to the gold diggers.

Hugely disappointing and shocking news. Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar. A move of this magnitude couldn't have been made without consent of Larry and Sergey, so it makes me wonder why from their perspective.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.

Can we please stop saying anything about "AGI"? I remember when people would be like "AGI in 3 months" / "AGI in 2024" / "AGI is confirmed in 2025" like stop, you don't know if it's even a thing, let alone if it's coming/imminent.

"Onwards!"

These guys...

The momentum is not being conserved here.

This doesn’t sound like stepping down this sounds like stepping up within Google.

Related:

The next chapter of our AI momentum

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755

Jeff and Sanjay both leaving!

Source: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203

(https://xcancel.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203)

Well, damn. Jeff, Sanjay and Demis leaving all at once, it's hard not to read that as someone fucked up pretty bad.

Let's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?

Two thoughts on this.

First, it is incredibly difficult to pivot a large organization because there are too many competing interests, too many fiefdoms people have built and too much organizational inertia. A new company has the advantage of a singularity of purpose. Google has to compete with internal interests about AI disrupting search, ad revenue and so on. This can slow you down and limit the resources you get. It's why companies get disrupted, particularly when they reach monopoly status. Steve jobs said it best [1].

Second, Gogole's path here (IMHO) is to make their own hardware. They've already done this with their TPUs but need to be able to compete with NVidia offerings. NVidia controlling the price, features and, most importantly, who gets to buy them is bad for Google. This is what Google should be pouring billions into.

The beauty of this is that success is easily measurable against metrics like price-per-petaflops, performance-per-Watt and so on. Throw money at some key Nvidia engineers and have them design silicon for you for TSMC to fab.

I still believe that Google is positioned to survive the (IMHO) inevitable AI bubble popping.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=3s

No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar.

If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?

anybody watching the pace of output from Gemini team has been nothing but disappointing. meanwhile anthropic and openai has surpassed them.

I do wonder if anybody working at Google can give us an insight why the chaos and lack of competitiveness?

Sundar Pichai: @DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs.

https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093

So it's not stepping down, right?

By the article, it looks like he's actually stepping up.

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when you attack the king make sure to kill the king.

Demis tried to be google ceo by pumping out self aggrandizing 'documentaries' and highfalutin interviews where said a whole bunch of nothing.

Oh wow demis and Jeff, that Ethics engineer who left GDM, and reached to both and posted on lesswrong a couple weeks [1] ago did make a difference?

1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...