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https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724 https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724 > Announcing Discovery Loop! > I am very excit

https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724 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.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
manvel_hn 2mo ago
It's quite interesting that those events are happening at the same moment. I wonder whether they are related
- aix1 2mo ago
  I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
    Isn't it "just" a matter of Jeff Dean (& co) leaving, Hassabis replacing Dean, and Kavukcuoglu replacing Hassabis ? A massive shake up for sure, but why do you see it as separate events merely timed to coincide ?
    - aix1 2mo ago
      So there are two events here: Event 1 - Jeff & co leaving. Event 2 - Demis stepping down. DeepMind doesn't need a "chair" and "Alphabet's chief scientist" is a bullshit title that Jeff invented for himself when he moved from Google Research to GDM, to make it look like we wasn't abandoning the former for the latter. The third change is basically ratifying the status quo, since Koray has been de factor running GDM for a while now (and directly reporting to Sundar in addition to reporting to Demis, who in turn also reported to Sundar - quite some triangle there).
      - aix1 2mo ago
        One detail I missed is that Koray's new title is "SVP of Google DeepMind"[1], i.e. identical to his old title. So, basically, the third change is even more of a no-op than I thought. It seems pretty clear that GDM will no longer have a CEO. [1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/ https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...
  - xnx 2mo ago
    Yes. In public relations you never want to trickle out bad/concerning the news, you want to "rip off the band-aid and preferably follow it up with some positive/distracting news like 3.5 Pro model release or price drops.
- lostdog 2mo ago
  Some do-nothing EVP probably just got control over the Gemini org
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
    Gemini had come under Hassabis, being co-led by Shazeer and Vinyals, who are now both gone. Gemini will now come under Koray Kavukcuoglu, reporting direct to Pichai as SVP of DeepMind. Big shake up for Gemini it seems.
jgilias 2mo ago
Is it _that_ Jeff Dean? https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts
- pdpi 2mo ago
  Yes, him.
- 12345hn6789 2mo ago
  "Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points." ahahah golden. Will be following their journey
- judah 2mo ago
  > When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE) Uh oh...
  - dekhn 2mo ago
    Basically, he had a server that did code indexing running on his workstation. If he didn't login and run a command to refresh his prod credentials every day, the server would lose its ability to talk to prod (as it should) and fail. Much of the company depended on that service. Eventually it was moved to prod.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
    That's a pretty poor reflection on him if true. I've noticed that Gemini has been timing out yesterday & today !
- AceJohnny2 2mo ago
  Fun fact: the Jeff Dean Facts was started by Kenton Varda (kentonv around here [1]), as a joke inside Google. He has expressed regret that it eclipsed Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom Jeff Dean basically did pair-programming with. [1] also known for open-sourcing ProtoBufs v2, creating CapnProto and Sandstorm, and commenting on the recent Cloudflare OS post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996
throwaw12 2mo ago
Is Jeff also leaving Google? I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team
- compiler-guy 2mo ago
  They are leaving Google, but Google is an investor in the new company. So a split, but not exactly a divorce. Or something.
  - asdfman123 2mo ago
    A "Maria's not an asset to the abbey" situation for you Sound of Music enjoyers.
    - compiler-guy 2mo ago
      Except no one was singing "How do you solve a problem like Jeff and Sanjay?" prior to this.
      - asdfman123 2mo ago
        You don't know that for sure.
        defen 2mo ago
        Ewing Theory, but for trillion dollar corporations.
    - leoc 2mo ago
      It seems reminiscent of the Green Project/FirstPerson episode that led to Java https://landley.net/history/mirror/java/javaorigin.html https://landley.net/history/mirror/java/javaorigin.html , and I'm sure many another attempt to keep some unhappy star players in a company's orbit using a spinoff.
- colesantiago 2mo ago
stefan_ 2mo ago
Turns out you can't pay em as much as VC will, haha
- dominotw 2mo ago
  its a public benefit corp
  - cherryteastain 2mo ago
    So is Anthropic...
    - solenoid0937 2mo ago
      Anthropic has stuck pretty closely to their stated intent even if HN does not agree with that intent
  - bix6 2mo ago
    Don’t worry they will just limit them to a 10x return but then later on just convert to for profit and fahgetabout the cap!
    - solenoid0937 2mo ago
      I don't think Anthropic (the only major PBC in this space) ever did this. OpenAI did but they had a totally different structure and were never a PBC. If these guys adopt a similar LTBT+PBC structure to Anthropic it should be more resilient.
      - namocat 2mo ago
        OpenAI has a PBC now
  - stefan_ 2mo ago
    Funny how that works, so are Anthropic and OpenAI apparently. Maybe there is something we are missing here!
jcfrei 2mo ago
I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to much more data: Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments - and so on. And they need the data in much higher fidelity than you can currently access. If we just feed AI with all the knowledge we've acquired it's much harder for it to become smarter than us - it basically needs it's own eyes, ears, nose and so on.
- Oras 2mo ago
  > Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better
  - willy_k 2mo ago
    That’s because a significant portion of the work and spending going on at frontier labs is generating new, more curated data, in select domains like software engineering and now biology[1]. [1] https://www.synbiobeta.com/read/anthropic-is-hiring-biologists-building-wet-labs-and-betting-big-on-drug-discovery https://www.synbiobeta.com/read/anthropic-is-hiring-biologis...
    - bkaae 2mo ago
      I think that was his argument as well. It looks like there is no more data to find, but then it becomes important to find more data - lo and behold we can make more. Sounds like the oil scare from 90' - we thought we were gonna run out of oil. But as oil gets more expensive it pays to dig further down to find the stuff that didn't make sense to dig up before.
      - xnx 2mo ago
mosura 2mo ago
Is the subtext that Demis was trying to block what Dean etc wanted to do and so they had to leave Google in order to do it?

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

manvel_hn 2mo ago

It's quite interesting that those events are happening at the same moment. I wonder whether they are related

aix1 2mo ago
I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  Isn't it "just" a matter of Jeff Dean (& co) leaving, Hassabis replacing Dean, and Kavukcuoglu replacing Hassabis ? A massive shake up for sure, but why do you see it as separate events merely timed to coincide ?
  - aix1 2mo ago
    So there are two events here: Event 1 - Jeff & co leaving. Event 2 - Demis stepping down. DeepMind doesn't need a "chair" and "Alphabet's chief scientist" is a bullshit title that Jeff invented for himself when he moved from Google Research to GDM, to make it look like we wasn't abandoning the former for the latter. The third change is basically ratifying the status quo, since Koray has been de factor running GDM for a while now (and directly reporting to Sundar in addition to reporting to Demis, who in turn also reported to Sundar - quite some triangle there).
    - aix1 2mo ago
      One detail I missed is that Koray's new title is "SVP of Google DeepMind"[1], i.e. identical to his old title. So, basically, the third change is even more of a no-op than I thought. It seems pretty clear that GDM will no longer have a CEO. [1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/ https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...
- xnx 2mo ago
  Yes. In public relations you never want to trickle out bad/concerning the news, you want to "rip off the band-aid and preferably follow it up with some positive/distracting news like 3.5 Pro model release or price drops.
lostdog 2mo ago
Some do-nothing EVP probably just got control over the Gemini org
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  Gemini had come under Hassabis, being co-led by Shazeer and Vinyals, who are now both gone. Gemini will now come under Koray Kavukcuoglu, reporting direct to Pichai as SVP of DeepMind. Big shake up for Gemini it seems.

jgilias 2mo ago

Is it _that_ Jeff Dean? https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts

pdpi 2mo ago
Yes, him.
12345hn6789 2mo ago
"Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points." ahahah golden. Will be following their journey
judah 2mo ago
> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE) Uh oh...
- dekhn 2mo ago
  Basically, he had a server that did code indexing running on his workstation. If he didn't login and run a command to refresh his prod credentials every day, the server would lose its ability to talk to prod (as it should) and fail. Much of the company depended on that service. Eventually it was moved to prod.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  That's a pretty poor reflection on him if true. I've noticed that Gemini has been timing out yesterday & today !
AceJohnny2 2mo ago
Fun fact: the Jeff Dean Facts was started by Kenton Varda (kentonv around here [1]), as a joke inside Google. He has expressed regret that it eclipsed Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom Jeff Dean basically did pair-programming with. [1] also known for open-sourcing ProtoBufs v2, creating CapnProto and Sandstorm, and commenting on the recent Cloudflare OS post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996

throwaw12 2mo ago

Is Jeff also leaving Google? I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team

compiler-guy 2mo ago
They are leaving Google, but Google is an investor in the new company. So a split, but not exactly a divorce. Or something.
- asdfman123 2mo ago
  A "Maria's not an asset to the abbey" situation for you Sound of Music enjoyers.
  - compiler-guy 2mo ago
    Except no one was singing "How do you solve a problem like Jeff and Sanjay?" prior to this.
    - asdfman123 2mo ago
      You don't know that for sure.
      - defen 2mo ago
        Ewing Theory, but for trillion dollar corporations.
  - leoc 2mo ago
    It seems reminiscent of the Green Project/FirstPerson episode that led to Java https://landley.net/history/mirror/java/javaorigin.html https://landley.net/history/mirror/java/javaorigin.html , and I'm sure many another attempt to keep some unhappy star players in a company's orbit using a spinoff.
colesantiago 2mo ago

stefan_ 2mo ago

Turns out you can't pay em as much as VC will, haha

dominotw 2mo ago
its a public benefit corp
- cherryteastain 2mo ago
  So is Anthropic...
  - solenoid0937 2mo ago
    Anthropic has stuck pretty closely to their stated intent even if HN does not agree with that intent
- bix6 2mo ago
  Don’t worry they will just limit them to a 10x return but then later on just convert to for profit and fahgetabout the cap!
  - solenoid0937 2mo ago
    I don't think Anthropic (the only major PBC in this space) ever did this. OpenAI did but they had a totally different structure and were never a PBC. If these guys adopt a similar LTBT+PBC structure to Anthropic it should be more resilient.
    - namocat 2mo ago
      OpenAI has a PBC now
- stefan_ 2mo ago
  Funny how that works, so are Anthropic and OpenAI apparently. Maybe there is something we are missing here!

jcfrei 2mo ago

I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to much more data: Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments - and so on. And they need the data in much higher fidelity than you can currently access. If we just feed AI with all the knowledge we've acquired it's much harder for it to become smarter than us - it basically needs it's own eyes, ears, nose and so on.

Oras 2mo ago
> Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better
- willy_k 2mo ago
  That’s because a significant portion of the work and spending going on at frontier labs is generating new, more curated data, in select domains like software engineering and now biology[1]. [1] https://www.synbiobeta.com/read/anthropic-is-hiring-biologists-building-wet-labs-and-betting-big-on-drug-discovery https://www.synbiobeta.com/read/anthropic-is-hiring-biologis...
  - bkaae 2mo ago
    I think that was his argument as well. It looks like there is no more data to find, but then it becomes important to find more data - lo and behold we can make more. Sounds like the oil scare from 90' - we thought we were gonna run out of oil. But as oil gets more expensive it pays to dig further down to find the stuff that didn't make sense to dig up before.
    - xnx 2mo ago

mosura 2mo ago

Is the subtext that Demis was trying to block what Dean etc wanted to do and so they had to leave Google in order to do it?