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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
by HarHarVeryFunny 3mo 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.
- taurath 3mo 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
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo agoProbably 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 3mo agoHe 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
- antupis 3mo agoBut it was Google fault that they really cannot productize all that innovation that happened DeepMind. Google probably now fumbled with world models and this exodus will create next giant in that space.
- nolist_policy 3mo ago> Google probably now fumbled with world models [...]. Can you explain this more precisely?
- ackbar03 3mo agoI have a feeling this might negatively impact Isomorphic as well since they also fall under Alphabet
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo agoHopefully not - Isomorphic also have external investors (maybe 10-20% ownership?), who may be willing to buy it outright from Google if they lose interest, and Hassabis is now said to be "leaning into" the role of Isomorphic CEO, which is at least pursuing his goal for scientific advance via AI, if only in one specific (important) direction. https://endpoints.news/demis-hassabis-leaning-into-isomorphic-ceo-role-amid-alphabets-ai-shake-up/ https://endpoints.news/demis-hassabis-leaning-into-isomorphi...
- kridsdale1 3mo agoSame thing happened to Yan LeCun. Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.
- WarmWash 3mo agoGoogle'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 3mo agothis 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.
- weatherlite 3mo ago> 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. If the goal is to maximize share price (which it is) this is probably the safest approach. Why do they have to keep chasing developing the best model when they can a) charge everyone for the cloud infra b) have a "good enough" experience for normal consumers Their current setup will be worth trillions. Already is. Let anthropic get paid for the most expensive queries while they get a bill from Google for their cloud/TPU use. GCP grew 82% YOY with 24B revenue and improving margins. So GCP became a 100B business. Anyone doubts it's gonna double in less than 5 years? Gemini just needs to be good enough for normal folks who want personal agents for everyday use. I don't think Google has to compete with Anthropic on making the best agentic programming model.
- mikert89 3mo agoI’ve heard the pay at deep mind is low and people are complaining about it
- bmitc 3mo agoHow low are we talking?
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo 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.
- moscoe 3mo agoI guess his big bet on world models didn’t pay off quickly enough
- justanotherjoe 3mo agoI think it's more than that. I made prediction in earlier 2024 that the main players of AI will stick with transformers while second class players will want to transcend it. The difference is admittedly a bit subtle but ai researchers would get it. I wrote it with mamba in mind back then, but google was still trying to come up with the 'next transformers' and one that can remember using weights and all that stuffs. You can say the same abt lecun's and ilya's now. My main reasoning was that transformers was the lightning in a bottle and the best work is in extending it instead of transcending it, which requires you to capture another lightning . Which to me appears to miss the assignment. OpenAI, Antrophic, they understand this intimately. Google on the other hand, fell victim to their own ambition.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo agoThis of course depends on what your goal is. If your goal is purely commercial, or time critical, then a product-based approach of squeezing all the juice out of LLMs makes sense. If your goal is truly human-level AGI then this is more of an open-ended research endeavor, and timelines are hard to predict. Arguably we have only "captured lightning in a bottle" once in the last decade - the original 2017 attention paper - and so the timeline for a "few more Transformer-level breakthroughs" might more realistically be estimated in decades rather than years. You could argue that the application of RL to LLMs as a training method was a second "lightning in a bottle" but I don't think it changes the expected timeline of such discoveries by much. The time criticality seems to have become a huge factor for those pursuing LLMs, and certainly for OpenAI and Anthropic, who regard it as a race. It seems absurdly obvious (though many would disagree!) that LLMs alone are not going to achieve human-level intelligence and cognitive performance (using a slightly broader term there to include things like creativity, for those that might not consider that as part of intelligence). If you compare a Transformer to a brain, then the best parallel is that a Transformer is functionally similar - in being a prediction engine - to part of our cortex, but of course that means ignoring the other half our cortex - the feedback paths that enable continual learning, which in turn supports creativity. Of course people will probably respond "you don't need flapping wings to fly", but if you want to fly you do need SOME way of doing it, so brain comparisons are still valuable... If you look at our brain architecture and identify all the components and connections that have no equivalent in a Transformer, and if the goal is human-level capability, then you do need to understand what each of those brain components achieve functionally, and have SOME way of providing that functionality in your LLM+ or whatever you call it. LLMs' lack of any functional equivalent to our cortex's feedback paths - lack of continual learning - has been recognized as one major functional deficit, but there are probably half a dozen others too, reflecting the multiple "Transformer level" breakthoughs that Hassabis notes are needed. While you don't need flapping wings to fly, you do need to invent the airplane, and even after 100+ years of airplane advances we've yet to build an airplane even remotely as capable as what some birds and insects are able to achieve. Maybe 2017 was the Wright Bros moment where humans first learnt to do some of what our brains can do.
- Cidan 3mo agoCEO 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.
- Keyframe 3mo agoInevitably, 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?
- ulfw 3mo agoGoogle? Focus? Huh? Focus would be the last word that comes to mind. Honestly, ever.
- weatherlite 3mo ago> 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? Alphabet Chief Scientist doesnt sound like a demotion / lack of influence to me but who knows. We're all just speculating here.
- _the_inflator 3mo agoRoughly two years ago suddenly Hassabis was heavily promoted on all Google YouTube channels. It was to fight ChatGPT and promote Gemini. I think the guy does a very poor job or is simply not the right guy to appear as public figure for Gemini. At least he tried. He is a man for everything that is not filmed. Google doesn’t really have a person to give Gemini or AI a human face. And that is only consequential because Google never had any public person with any charisma like Jobs, Zuck, Altman.
- azornathogron 3mo agoDo Zuck or Altman have charisma? (Jobs I'll give you.)
- SwedishDungeon 3mo agoNo.