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I feel like this is a bad sign. What this announcement reads like is "Hey! I won this internal political struggle!". Ok, sure, not sure why anyone outside the c

I feel like this is a bad sign. What this announcement reads like is "Hey! I won this internal political struggle!". Ok, sure, not sure why anyone outside the company should take this as good news. This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape goat for missing AI. Remember - what this announcement means is that Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure. Trying to synthesize those two separate teams (half of which wanted you to fail) into one productive and world-leading team is a hell of an ask.

dougmwne 4y ago
Yeah, absolutely lining him up to be the scapegoat. His chance for success seems severely compromised and his mission was always to invent AGI, not create some kind of lowly ad-search product. The party sounds over for him and I bet he will be out and off to the next research think-tank soon.
hervature 4y ago
My outsider perspective is that DeepMind was the research arm and Brain was specifically tasked with making the company money through AI/ML applications. This appears to me that Google is combining the two to make sure that DeepMind starts turning a profit by adopting Brain's mission. Of course, DeepMind's brand is orders of magnitude more valuable so it makes sense to keep the name around. Would be happy to hear more knowledgeable takes on if this is an incorrect reading of the tea leaves.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  Will we ever live in a world where people once again use first-person pronouns?
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    I asked GPT-4 to do it and it scattered first-person pronouns everywhere. https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 Happy now?
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      In all seriousness, can we not agree that the version with the correct grammar is a better aesthetic reading experience?
  - JLCarveth 4y ago
    How is this relevant to the comment you were replying to?
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      What’s the point of earning magic internet beans if not to spend them pointlessly policing bad grammar?
- loudmax 4y ago
  Google has (or until very recently had) some of the best researchers in the industry. Google's problem isn't developing new stuff, it's turning stuff they come up with into a viable product and then developing a market around it. All of their most successful products (search, gmail, maps, youtube) were developed at least a decade ago. They've come up with decent technology since then, but they seem to have developed a catastrophic inability to actually build a business around any of it. The failures of Google+, Duo/Allo, Inbox, Stadia have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with managerial incompetence. Google could be sitting on the most advanced AI on the planet, but none of that matters as long as they're under the current leadership.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    They made the enormous mistake of releasing bard with a lightweight model. It instantly made google look like they were way behind, and made bard largely irrelevant. Bard should have been limited access and been the absolute most power model they had. Now everyone is questioning if Google actually can compete with OpenAI at all, despite decades headstart and far more research and funding.
- spokesbeing 4y ago
  This is not correct. Both DeepMind and Brain had/have separate applied groups. A lot of Brain research was/is not product focused at all. Transformers I'd say are more impactful than any other research innovation in the current AI boom and came from Brain not DM. DM does do great PR.
manux 4y ago
> Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure Having been in both places (Brain and DM), this feels so far from what I experienced that I must ask, what are you basing this on?
- uptownfunk 4y ago
  This reads pretty normal for big tech corporate politics.
  - khazhoux 4y ago
    I never like the word “politics.” It carries the association of a bunch of people just playing backstabbing games to further themselves. While this does occur, in general what I see is that with any large-enough group of people, there will be strong differences of opinions on how to steer the project to success. In fact, I don’t think I can remember a single “political battle” that didn’t stem from a legitimate concern in how some project was being run and what they had decided to focus on.
    - uptownfunk 4y ago
      Like it or not, politics is pretty much your day to day life at vp+ level at these companies. But we can all pretend to live in idealism la la land where everything is operating on someone’s best intention.
- caminante 4y ago
  You worked there and didn't know of any of the intra-company autonomy infighting that leaked into the news? [0] [1] [0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-research-divisions-into-google-deepmind/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-res... [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...
  - sangnoir 4y ago
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape goat for missing AI. I read that to mean the party is over, we are treating that as a strategic subject and are streamlining our organisation. As you rightfully pointed Google basically had two competing organisations with all the complexity associated with that. That’s now over. From now on, there is only one captain steering the ship.
deelowe 4y ago
Do you have any prior knowledge of these teams? They weren't working against each other. One group focused on research and the other focused on products.
- jstx1 4y ago
  Is it bad that I can't tell which one was focused on products? It seems like neither of them was.
  - deelowe 4y ago
    Why should you? Neither were public facing.
    - wsgeorge 4y ago
      > Neither were public facing Which sort of illustrates the point...
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  Not to be snarky but do you realize that what you have stated is the definition of working against each other? Research teams are about getting to the paper and a deeper understanding, product teams are about getting something out the door that helps you capture value whether you understand it or not. Engineering research teams are notorious for being both ungovernable and spending so much time "understanding" their ideas that they miss the market window. The canonical book on the subject for me was "Fumbling the Future" which talked about Xerox PARC, I worked in Sun Labs ("where good ideas go to die"), hired people out of Microsoft's BARC (Bay Area Research Center), and worked in IBM's Watson group which pulled a bunch of people out of research to "make a product out of AI". It is a really hard problem to "commercialize" imagination or innovation. Two very different mindsets between "doing product" and "doing research." DOW Chemical did a pretty good job of it, but they have always been more "components of the solution" rather than the full solution.
  - deelowe 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
victor106 4y ago
As much as I would like Google to compete strongly with OpenAI(i.e., ClosedAI) I somehow have this feeling that they are going to end up like IBM Watson.
- 10xDev 4y ago
  ChatGPT Wouldn’t even exist without Google e.g. Transformers, Deep RL.
  - shmoogy 4y ago
    And that's the last thing they probably contribute with how that turned out for Google
  - ErneX 4y ago
    Remember Xerox PARC and the GUI.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    so sick of this line of corporate worship. "Google" didn't invent anything, the employees did, and the top talent are leaving. Ilya Sutskever was a very key person at Google before he left to start OpenAI, and at most one person from the context is all you need paper still even work there. the view of outside google of how great they are has zero bearing on the realities inside the company. the company is people - and google is no longer the place to be if you have talent. simple as that.
    - 10xDev 4y ago
      > "Google" didn't invent anything, the employees did No shit, way to be pedantic over a common simple abstraction. Do you want a list of every author for every thing that is ever invented when someone refers to something?
      - nr2x 4y ago
        It’s not pedantry, people keep saying “google” “invented” this stuff and a) no, they paid the people who did, and b) those people are no longer there. “Google” is the wrong model of abstraction to deal with as with the founders long gone there is no intrinsically stable mapping between “Google” and “ai talent”. This isn’t PageRank where the founder invented the original tech. Sundar going on 60 minutes saying vapid nonsense like “ai is fire” is the furthest extent of his abilities. There is nobody in power at google who is capable of leading in this moment.
matrix_overload 4y ago
Don't worry, they will sunset it in 3 years, like every other project.
jutrewag 4y ago
This sounds like poor, unsubstantiated gossip and drama from TMZ. Sounds like you have an axe to grind.
bookofjoe 4y ago
File under: A. Lincoln, team of rivals

dougmwne 4y ago

Yeah, absolutely lining him up to be the scapegoat. His chance for success seems severely compromised and his mission was always to invent AGI, not create some kind of lowly ad-search product. The party sounds over for him and I bet he will be out and off to the next research think-tank soon.

hervature 4y ago

My outsider perspective is that DeepMind was the research arm and Brain was specifically tasked with making the company money through AI/ML applications. This appears to me that Google is combining the two to make sure that DeepMind starts turning a profit by adopting Brain's mission. Of course, DeepMind's brand is orders of magnitude more valuable so it makes sense to keep the name around. Would be happy to hear more knowledgeable takes on if this is an incorrect reading of the tea leaves.

williamcotton 4y ago
Will we ever live in a world where people once again use first-person pronouns?
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I asked GPT-4 to do it and it scattered first-person pronouns everywhere. https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05 Happy now?
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    In all seriousness, can we not agree that the version with the correct grammar is a better aesthetic reading experience?
- JLCarveth 4y ago
  How is this relevant to the comment you were replying to?
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    What’s the point of earning magic internet beans if not to spend them pointlessly policing bad grammar?
loudmax 4y ago
Google has (or until very recently had) some of the best researchers in the industry. Google's problem isn't developing new stuff, it's turning stuff they come up with into a viable product and then developing a market around it. All of their most successful products (search, gmail, maps, youtube) were developed at least a decade ago. They've come up with decent technology since then, but they seem to have developed a catastrophic inability to actually build a business around any of it. The failures of Google+, Duo/Allo, Inbox, Stadia have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with managerial incompetence. Google could be sitting on the most advanced AI on the planet, but none of that matters as long as they're under the current leadership.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  They made the enormous mistake of releasing bard with a lightweight model. It instantly made google look like they were way behind, and made bard largely irrelevant. Bard should have been limited access and been the absolute most power model they had. Now everyone is questioning if Google actually can compete with OpenAI at all, despite decades headstart and far more research and funding.
spokesbeing 4y ago
This is not correct. Both DeepMind and Brain had/have separate applied groups. A lot of Brain research was/is not product focused at all. Transformers I'd say are more impactful than any other research innovation in the current AI boom and came from Brain not DM. DM does do great PR.

manux 4y ago

> Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure Having been in both places (Brain and DM), this feels so far from what I experienced that I must ask, what are you basing this on?

uptownfunk 4y ago
This reads pretty normal for big tech corporate politics.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  I never like the word “politics.” It carries the association of a bunch of people just playing backstabbing games to further themselves. While this does occur, in general what I see is that with any large-enough group of people, there will be strong differences of opinions on how to steer the project to success. In fact, I don’t think I can remember a single “political battle” that didn’t stem from a legitimate concern in how some project was being run and what they had decided to focus on.
  - uptownfunk 4y ago
    Like it or not, politics is pretty much your day to day life at vp+ level at these companies. But we can all pretend to live in idealism la la land where everything is operating on someone’s best intention.
caminante 4y ago
You worked there and didn't know of any of the intra-company autonomy infighting that leaked into the news? [0] [1] [0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-research-divisions-into-google-deepmind/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-res... [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...
- sangnoir 4y ago

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

> This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape goat for missing AI. I read that to mean the party is over, we are treating that as a strategic subject and are streamlining our organisation. As you rightfully pointed Google basically had two competing organisations with all the complexity associated with that. That’s now over. From now on, there is only one captain steering the ship.

deelowe 4y ago

Do you have any prior knowledge of these teams? They weren't working against each other. One group focused on research and the other focused on products.

jstx1 4y ago
Is it bad that I can't tell which one was focused on products? It seems like neither of them was.
- deelowe 4y ago
  Why should you? Neither were public facing.
  - wsgeorge 4y ago
    > Neither were public facing Which sort of illustrates the point...
ChuckMcM 4y ago
Not to be snarky but do you realize that what you have stated is the definition of working against each other? Research teams are about getting to the paper and a deeper understanding, product teams are about getting something out the door that helps you capture value whether you understand it or not. Engineering research teams are notorious for being both ungovernable and spending so much time "understanding" their ideas that they miss the market window. The canonical book on the subject for me was "Fumbling the Future" which talked about Xerox PARC, I worked in Sun Labs ("where good ideas go to die"), hired people out of Microsoft's BARC (Bay Area Research Center), and worked in IBM's Watson group which pulled a bunch of people out of research to "make a product out of AI". It is a really hard problem to "commercialize" imagination or innovation. Two very different mindsets between "doing product" and "doing research." DOW Chemical did a pretty good job of it, but they have always been more "components of the solution" rather than the full solution.
- deelowe 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

victor106 4y ago

As much as I would like Google to compete strongly with OpenAI(i.e., ClosedAI) I somehow have this feeling that they are going to end up like IBM Watson.

10xDev 4y ago
ChatGPT Wouldn’t even exist without Google e.g. Transformers, Deep RL.
- shmoogy 4y ago
  And that's the last thing they probably contribute with how that turned out for Google
- ErneX 4y ago
  Remember Xerox PARC and the GUI.
- nr2x 4y ago
  so sick of this line of corporate worship. "Google" didn't invent anything, the employees did, and the top talent are leaving. Ilya Sutskever was a very key person at Google before he left to start OpenAI, and at most one person from the context is all you need paper still even work there. the view of outside google of how great they are has zero bearing on the realities inside the company. the company is people - and google is no longer the place to be if you have talent. simple as that.
  - 10xDev 4y ago
    > "Google" didn't invent anything, the employees did No shit, way to be pedantic over a common simple abstraction. Do you want a list of every author for every thing that is ever invented when someone refers to something?
    - nr2x 4y ago
      It’s not pedantry, people keep saying “google” “invented” this stuff and a) no, they paid the people who did, and b) those people are no longer there. “Google” is the wrong model of abstraction to deal with as with the founders long gone there is no intrinsically stable mapping between “Google” and “ai talent”. This isn’t PageRank where the founder invented the original tech. Sundar going on 60 minutes saying vapid nonsense like “ai is fire” is the furthest extent of his abilities. There is nobody in power at google who is capable of leading in this moment.

matrix_overload 4y ago

Don't worry, they will sunset it in 3 years, like every other project.

jutrewag 4y ago

This sounds like poor, unsubstantiated gossip and drama from TMZ. Sounds like you have an axe to grind.

bookofjoe 4y ago

File under: A. Lincoln, team of rivals