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Sundar's email mentions something critical - Jeff Dean is going to be the Chief Scientist in DeepMind, and coordinate back to Sundar. This is a big deal; that m

Sundar's email mentions something critical - Jeff Dean is going to be the Chief Scientist in DeepMind, and coordinate back to Sundar. This is a big deal; that move tells you that Google is taking being behind on public-facing AI seriously, Dean is an incredibly valuable, incredibly scarce resource. If we wind way back to Google Docs, Gmail and Android strategy, they took market share from leaders by giving away high quality products. If I were in charge of strategy there, I would double down on the Stability / Facebook plan, and open source PaLM architecture Chinchilla-optimal foundation models stat. Then I'd build tooling to run and customize the models over GCP, so open + cloud. I'd probably start selling TPUv4 racks immediately as well. I don't believe they can win on a direct API business model this cycle. But, I think they could do a form of embrace and extend by going radically open and leveraging their research + deployment skills.

neximo64 4y ago
Jeff Dean is the reason OpenAI has beaten Google as it stands today. Not much weight in it being a good decision. He was too risk averse.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dougmwne 4y ago
That sounds like a fairly brilliant counter to "Open"AI. Something tells me that Google is still too scared of this tech in the hands of the public to go there though.
- owlglass 4y ago
  What indicates that Google is "too scared" as opposed to merely lagging behind?
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    Piles of previous statements talking about safety and a general unwillingness to put any of its models in the hands of anyone not under NDA. Bard is the first counterexample I can think of and that was forced by OpenAI.
  - scottyah 4y ago
    Anecdotally, Bard is much better at guiding the responses than chatGPT. They're slowly releasing more and more "features" as they feel comfortable. You can see what they're up to with the TestAI kitchen app. I kinda liked how open chatGPT was before the heavy filtering, but I see why we need to reign in chaos overall.
tempusalaria 4y ago
Jeff Dean is clearly one of the greatest software developers/engineers ever but there isn’t much evidence that he is a brilliant ML researcher And indeed Google AI has achieved very little product wise during his time as CEO. Kind of suggests he is a big part of bureaucratic challenges they have faced
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  It seems like that being an incredible software engineer is more important these days, look at Greg Brockman’s background.
  - tempusalaria 4y ago
    Right but Ilya is the Chief Scientist of OpenAI not Greg Brockman
    - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
      I heard Ilya wasnt behind the big innnovations at OpenAI. It was lesser known scientists
      - tempusalaria 4y ago
        OpenAI from a research point of view haven’t really had any “big innovations”. At least I struggle to think of any published research they have done that would qualify in that category. Probably they keep the good stuff for themselves But Ilya definitely had some big papers before and he is widely acknowledged as a top researcher in the field.
        fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
        I think the fact that there are no other systems publicly available that are comparable to GPT-4 (and I dont think Bard is as good), points to innovation they havent released
jstx1 4y ago
This announcement, including the leadership changes, sounds more like they've shut down DeepMind and moved everyone over to Google Brain. Keeping the DeepMind name for the new team is a clever trick to make it look like more positive news than it actually is.
- aix1 4y ago
  Demis remains at the helm though, doesn't he?
  - andygeorge 4y ago
    ehhhhhhh sure but for how long? these statements stick out to me: - "I’m sure you will have lots of questions about what this new unit will look like" aka we're not going to talk about specifics in public comms - "Jeff Dean will take on the elevated role ... reporting to me. ... Working alongside Demis, Jeff will help set the future direction of our AI research" aka Demis isn't the only Big Dog in the room anymore
  - soVeryTired 4y ago
    Honestly is Demis that big a deal? I always figured it was the researchers a layer or two down (e.g. David Silver) who were doing the real work.
    - aix1 4y ago
      He is key to defining the culture (secrecy etc). There is a huge culture difference between Brain and DM and, with Demis at the helm, I'm concerned that it'll be Brain moving towards DM culture, not vice versa.
uptownfunk 4y ago
The AI primitives are pretty basic. The real brains are figuring out how to make the best model. The engineering integration are pretty straightforward
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
There was also a separate DeepMind announcement made by Hassabis: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/announcing-google-deepmind https://www.deepmind.com/blog/announcing-google-deepmind It seems that DeepMind has now gone from what had appeared to be a blue sky research org to almost a product group, with Google Research now being the primary research group. Jeff Dean's reputation has always been as an uber-engineer, not any kind of visionary or great leader, so it's not obvious how well suited he's going to be to this somewhat odd role of Chief Scientist both to Google DeepMind and Google Research. How things have changed since OpenAI was founded on the fear that Google was becoming an unbeatable powerhouse in AI!
ggm 4y ago
I'd hope that a direct report to the top also has the strength of character to call for shutting it down, if it doesn't fly. Or, to respond appropriately to requests to commercialise it, with huge latent risks. Rushing it out the door in a space race model is probably not a good idea. At this point, the value proposition is moot. As a client and even paying customer of google I don't want this AI intruded into my product experiences without a big fat OFF switch. Not because of some terminator skynet fantasy: I want an opportunity to discriminate between reality as projected from pagerank and classic NLP algorithms, from the synthetic responses from a model.
ergocoder 4y ago
Jeff Dean has been at Google since forever. He is incredibly influential. If he wanted to change things for better (in other people's eyes), he would have done a long long time ago. My gut says that this wouldn't change things one bit. If anything, it will be worse with this giant org. If thousands of people aren't enough, 10,000 wouldn't help much

neximo64 4y ago

Jeff Dean is the reason OpenAI has beaten Google as it stands today. Not much weight in it being a good decision. He was too risk averse.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dougmwne 4y ago

That sounds like a fairly brilliant counter to "Open"AI. Something tells me that Google is still too scared of this tech in the hands of the public to go there though.

owlglass 4y ago
What indicates that Google is "too scared" as opposed to merely lagging behind?
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Piles of previous statements talking about safety and a general unwillingness to put any of its models in the hands of anyone not under NDA. Bard is the first counterexample I can think of and that was forced by OpenAI.
- scottyah 4y ago
  Anecdotally, Bard is much better at guiding the responses than chatGPT. They're slowly releasing more and more "features" as they feel comfortable. You can see what they're up to with the TestAI kitchen app. I kinda liked how open chatGPT was before the heavy filtering, but I see why we need to reign in chaos overall.

tempusalaria 4y ago

Jeff Dean is clearly one of the greatest software developers/engineers ever but there isn’t much evidence that he is a brilliant ML researcher And indeed Google AI has achieved very little product wise during his time as CEO. Kind of suggests he is a big part of bureaucratic challenges they have faced

VirusNewbie 4y ago
It seems like that being an incredible software engineer is more important these days, look at Greg Brockman’s background.
- tempusalaria 4y ago
  Right but Ilya is the Chief Scientist of OpenAI not Greg Brockman
  - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    I heard Ilya wasnt behind the big innnovations at OpenAI. It was lesser known scientists
    - tempusalaria 4y ago
      OpenAI from a research point of view haven’t really had any “big innovations”. At least I struggle to think of any published research they have done that would qualify in that category. Probably they keep the good stuff for themselves But Ilya definitely had some big papers before and he is widely acknowledged as a top researcher in the field.
      - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
        I think the fact that there are no other systems publicly available that are comparable to GPT-4 (and I dont think Bard is as good), points to innovation they havent released

jstx1 4y ago

This announcement, including the leadership changes, sounds more like they've shut down DeepMind and moved everyone over to Google Brain. Keeping the DeepMind name for the new team is a clever trick to make it look like more positive news than it actually is.

aix1 4y ago
Demis remains at the helm though, doesn't he?
- andygeorge 4y ago
  ehhhhhhh sure but for how long? these statements stick out to me: - "I’m sure you will have lots of questions about what this new unit will look like" aka we're not going to talk about specifics in public comms - "Jeff Dean will take on the elevated role ... reporting to me. ... Working alongside Demis, Jeff will help set the future direction of our AI research" aka Demis isn't the only Big Dog in the room anymore
- soVeryTired 4y ago
  Honestly is Demis that big a deal? I always figured it was the researchers a layer or two down (e.g. David Silver) who were doing the real work.
  - aix1 4y ago
    He is key to defining the culture (secrecy etc). There is a huge culture difference between Brain and DM and, with Demis at the helm, I'm concerned that it'll be Brain moving towards DM culture, not vice versa.

uptownfunk 4y ago

The AI primitives are pretty basic. The real brains are figuring out how to make the best model. The engineering integration are pretty straightforward

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

There was also a separate DeepMind announcement made by Hassabis: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/announcing-google-deepmind https://www.deepmind.com/blog/announcing-google-deepmind It seems that DeepMind has now gone from what had appeared to be a blue sky research org to almost a product group, with Google Research now being the primary research group. Jeff Dean's reputation has always been as an uber-engineer, not any kind of visionary or great leader, so it's not obvious how well suited he's going to be to this somewhat odd role of Chief Scientist both to Google DeepMind and Google Research. How things have changed since OpenAI was founded on the fear that Google was becoming an unbeatable powerhouse in AI!

ggm 4y ago

I'd hope that a direct report to the top also has the strength of character to call for shutting it down, if it doesn't fly. Or, to respond appropriately to requests to commercialise it, with huge latent risks. Rushing it out the door in a space race model is probably not a good idea. At this point, the value proposition is moot. As a client and even paying customer of google I don't want this AI intruded into my product experiences without a big fat OFF switch. Not because of some terminator skynet fantasy: I want an opportunity to discriminate between reality as projected from pagerank and classic NLP algorithms, from the synthetic responses from a model.

ergocoder 4y ago

Jeff Dean has been at Google since forever. He is incredibly influential. If he wanted to change things for better (in other people's eyes), he would have done a long long time ago. My gut says that this wouldn't change things one bit. If anything, it will be worse with this giant org. If thousands of people aren't enough, 10,000 wouldn't help much