Sundar Pichai: Demis Hassabis to Lead AGI and Science as Alphabet Chief Scientist
The next chapter of our AI momentum
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced leadership changes at Google DeepMind (GDM). Demis Hassabis will become Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, focusing on AGI and science, while Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up as SVP of Google DeepMind. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving to start an independent public benefit corporation for ML and science. The moves aim to accelerate AI progress and maintain Google's frontier position.
It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.
- GodelNumbering
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
- ra7
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.
- xnx
> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.
Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
- fhub
Google investing in Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat is a good result for Google. Means they are less likely to go to the competition and easier to bring them back into the fold if they do something next level.
- paxys
DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
- hypnodrones
Today I saw one of the most talented engineers I know and worked with leave DeepMind and now I probably know part of the "why". Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.
- dekhn
New Jeff Dean fact: when Jeff leaves Google, the stock drops 20 points.
- xtreak29
https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724
> Announcing Discovery Loop!
> I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
- atleastoptimal
I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this.
OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI to work at Google since their benefits will be capped by Google being large + having public company obligations.
- gandalfgeek
Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.
There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".