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Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

7 hours ago

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.

13 comments

HarHarVeryFunny

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Cidan  4 hours ago

CEO of <thing> at Google (not Alphabet) was always an informal title. There is no CEO of Cloud, CEO of YouTube, or CEO of DeepMind within Google internally -- it's always been an SVP role.

taurath  7 hours ago

> Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside.

Yeah he seemed too reasonable to me, relative to the fervor. Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing to catch up to the ferver that would justify their valuations and investments

  • WarmWash  6 hours ago

    Google's capex is to capture the compute purchases from the other labs. The amount they are spending on Gemini is probably shockingly low...and hence researchers leaving for better watered pastures.

    • dnnehgf  3 hours ago

      this is roughly how i've been reading their approach, but i wonder when/if this changes. what actually makes them start caring about having the most capable model? maybe nothing. i suppose they could be happy in a world where they (a) are still the agents' preferred search index and (b) own or produce a good percentage of the hardware that anthropic and openai run on.

  • HarHarVeryFunny  7 hours ago

    Probably not going to happen, but I'd love to see Isomorphic Labs separate from Alphabet with Hassabis still as CEO. He's too pure minded to be at company like Google.

    • IncreasePosts  35 minutes ago

      He won a nobel prize for his work on protein folding while at Google...it seems like they give him a lot of room to explore problems that aren't directly related to serving ads

  • HarHarVeryFunny  4 hours ago

    > Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing

    I don't get the impression from interviews that Kavukcuoglu is that guy - he seems like a safe pair of hands, but not someone that is on a mission.

    OTOH I don't even think this is the right race to be in.

  • kridsdale1  6 hours ago

    Same thing happened to Yan LeCun.

    Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.

Keyframe  3 hours ago

Inevitably, this will lead to Sundar Pichai replacement. I see nothing less. The sooner the better. I can't even tell what Google's focus is, is there any even?