Nördnytt! 🤓Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...
https://www.discoveryloop.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184960
https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724, https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724
- gandalfgeek - 4826 sekunder sedanWow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.
There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
- ra7 - 15267 sekunder sedanIt seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet.
The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
- GodelNumbering - 12552 sekunder sedanSo, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner
And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL
Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen
- xnx - 16556 sekunder sedan> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.
Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
- dekhn - 721 sekunder sedanNew Jeff Dean fact: when Jeff leaves Google, the stock drops 20 points.
- josh2600 - 185 sekunder sedanBets on Jeff and Sanjay joining anthropic?
My guess is 18-24 months.
- wernsey - 9819 sekunder sedanJust some random tidbit: When I was in high school I bought every computer gaming magazine I could get my hands on and could afford with my allowance.
So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.
Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]
I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.
It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
- paxys - 14090 sekunder sedanDeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
- atleastoptimal - 16047 sekunder sedanI think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this.
OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI to work at Google since their benefits will be capped by Google being large + having public company obligations.
- hypnodrones - 16399 sekunder sedanToday I saw one of the most talented engineers I know and worked with leave DeepMind and now I probably know part of the "why". Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.
- xtreak29 - 16671 sekunder sedanhttps://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.
- tacomonstrous - 16276 sekunder sedanEveryone commenting here seems to take this to mean he's leaving Google, when that's not what the article says.
- sdrinf - 5139 sekunder sedangemma-4 is an incredibly good model, beating several others five time its' size. Hope Jeff's departure won't impact their next-gen products! And best of success for their new ventures!
- closetheloopdev - 11768 sekunder sedanWith the top AI personnel leaving Google, I wonder what will happen to their Gemini. Right now they still have a lead in inference hardware with TPUs but with both Anthropic and OpenAI developing their own chips, I wonder how long until either one will catch up.
- firasd - 8955 sekunder sedanWho knew the real revenue unlock wouldn’t be based on how much paranoid red-teaming the model underwent to resist users jailbreaking its ‘alignment’, and instead more on whether the model is post-trained to use ‘sed’ and ‘git’? Poor Gemini
Scientist-heavy orgs that want to solve everything in token space may overtook tool use; meanwhile Anthropic has been super focused on MCP, Claude Code etc for over a year
- scrlk - 15603 sekunder sedanWhat happened to the "strike team" that Sergey Brin was leading to try and improve Gemini's coding performance?
- toshinoriyagi - 16480 sekunder sedanDeepmind always worked on some of the coolest architectures. Following things like AlphaStar, AlphaGo, and more were extremely exciting and felt like the hacker persona of machine learning. I hope Google can take advantage of this awesome team. They've done incredible work.
- jarpschope - 16557 sekunder sedanI found this article more thorough:
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...
- minraws - 3145 sekunder sedanWoW, so basically all senior members of GDM are now mostly gone? I thought Google was lagging in coding AI, but this suggests bigger issues.
I am not fan of the future of AI but this I am not sure how I feel about Google's (also Amazon recently laid off it's AGI team) AI initiatives blowing up before all the new AI Labs.
I don't get why Google failed here? maybe after a decade someone will write about it candidly.
- quaintdev - 14659 sekunder sedanI wonder if this has anything to do with it
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
- MikhailTal - 12273 sekunder sedan> Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads
Considering these are the best stats they could find, gemini usage+general situation must be really, really bleak.
High demand means nothing. A model being live is nothing to brag about. And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
- 650 - 15254 sekunder sedanThe first sentence is quite telling
>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…
Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought
- rossdavidh - 14154 sekunder sedanA few points:
1) the simplest explanation whenever a bunch of people leave [x] at a company at the same time, is that [x] is becoming less important to that company moving forward. It's not proof, but you know, everyone is trying really hard to say that's not what's happening here. Sometimes the simplest explanation is correct.
2) rumor is that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, got bored during pandemic lockdown and eventually returned to Google in a lower profile role, related to AI. I have to think that he still has a lot of say in what goes on in Google relative to his interests.
3) Yahoo Finance article says Hassabis "has long prioritized research over profits", so his replacement might indicate that Google has decided it is time for this stuff to pay for itself?
- segmondy - 15472 sekunder sedanEnd of an era for Alphabet.
- tonfa - 5962 sekunder sedanFrom https://www.ft.com/content/61d41764-f2f7-4906-a112-ff3073972...
> The moves suggest that DeepMind will be absorbed into Google’s broader business. [...] > They added that while Google DeepMind would not become purely commercial, it was integrating further into Google’s business.
I guess might be quite a change (but writing was on the wall, the Deepmind -> Google Deepmind part was the first step)
- mherrmann - 10062 sekunder sedanAt least judging from the headlines, it seems Google is far behind on AI. Fable/GPT 5.6 and recently Kimi get a lot of attention, solve long-standing math problems and lead in coding. It seems that Google's supposed advantages of very deep pockets, original talent, vast amounts of data and unmatched distribution are really not making that much of a difference. What is going wrong?
- chasd00 - 12885 sekunder sedanWhy form a "Public Benefit Corporation"? There must be some kind of access available that a regular for-profit corporation is excluded from. Politics perhaps? AI tells me PBCs can be shielded from shareholder lawsuits. Also "Founders can maintain vision control even as outside venture capital enters the cap table".
Seems like a good way to spend investor dollars without consequences while maintaining control. Maybe a bit cynical but i can't figure out why they'd form a PBC over anything else.
- simonreiff - 11394 sekunder sedanPublicity benefit corporation HAHAHA typo, think they mean public benefit corporation. Anthropic however is DEFINITELY a publicity benefit corporation.
- ddp26 - 6625 sekunder sedanThis seems bad for AI safety/risk. Does DeepMind have any checks on model alignment now? What's stopping them from using AI for military/surveillance purposes?
- luisln - 13405 sekunder sedanIf all the other AI companies are promising AGI by Q4 of next year, what else can you do to satisfy shareholders than also jump on that same bandwagon?
- gerash - 5719 sekunder sedanMy read: managing bureaucracy is a boring job esp. if you’re financially in a good spot.
Some think Gemini is falling behind in benchmarks so there was a shakeup at the top. I don’t agree with it.
That said, winning this LLM race is difficult given the number of talented people working on it across the world.
- nphardon - 14204 sekunder sedanWow we just had a post on here a couple weeks ago about Jeff Dean supporting dissident voices at Google.
- penguin_booze - 6301 sekunder sedanIt's chuckle-worthy that Axios webiste reads:
> ... independent publicity [sic] benefit corporation in which Google ...
A Freudian slip? https://archive.is/SxFjr.
- antirez - 14938 sekunder sedanChinese labs are the proof that there is no need of big names, but of the right mindset and agility. It's those last things that Google truly misses, but now they are missing for a long time, and outside the AI divisions too, in almost every department of the company.
- bsdpython - 14880 sekunder sedanJeff Dean leaving Google should be the headline but big news all around for Google AI nonetheless
- utopcell - 15241 sekunder sedanDemis stepped down? Who cares? Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google. We are in uncharted territory.
- heaney-555 - 14702 sekunder sedanThe Gemini 3.5 Pro delay has been catastrophic for Google. I'm really curious what has gone on behind the scenes there.
But missing out right as AI coding agents become genuinely deeply capable and useful is just an immense failure.
- defmetrix - 3617 sekunder sedanWoah, Jeff and Sanjay are big losses. The hits keep coming for google ai
- nsagent - 9523 sekunder sedanConsidering Hassabis co-founded Deepmind to pursue AGI, I take this pivot as a tacit understanding on his part that Deepmind isn't on a path towards AGI in the near future. They might at some point, but they cannot be close in his estimation, otherwise why leave now?
- al_be_back - 13991 sekunder sedanMakes sense to me... leaving to start their company with Google being an investor.
Clayton Christensen [1] says (paraphrasing) it's a good idea to spin-off (or invest) in a startup that you've a say on, before the ecosystem sprouts a seemingly-non-entity and gently disrupts your market.
Interestingly (diff strategies i guess) Apple tends to acquire (Q.ai) rather than invest/venture (as google in OP).
[1] The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
- htrp - 16405 sekunder sedanBetween Shazeer and these guys
Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads
- throwaw12 - 8376 sekunder sedanIf you lost your only 2 Senior Fellows, you deserve to be replaced yesterday
- eamag - 16512 sekunder sedanGoogle's stock dropped 5% right away, 200billion of value
- tosh - 16631 sekunder sedancan anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
- htrp - 16368 sekunder sedanHassabis is being promoted to Chair of Deepmind
- geephroh - 10310 sekunder sedanDunno what the longer term effects of this and the other departures will be, but in the world of vibe-finance Alphabet dumped 4.15% of share value as of this minute.
- rdiddly - 12225 sekunder sedanWelp, the market didn't like that. GOOG dropped about 5% on that news.
- mlmonkey - 12861 sekunder sedanGoogle loves to kick senior execs upstairs.
Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays.
It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.
- throwaw12 - 15200 sekunder sedanThis move was expected when Google shifted focus to Gemini-only.
- cosinetau - 13304 sekunder sedanSame day Google is rolling out layoffs.
- WarmWash - 16746 sekunder sedanAbsolute earthquake at Deepmind the last few months...
- epolanski - 16644 sekunder sedanThat's..huge. Hassabis has been the most important figure of the last 15 years in AI.
Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.
- adolph - 16766 sekunder sedan"Dean and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider.:
Kinsley Gaffe: A mistake whereby a politician inadvertently says something truthful which they had not meant to reveal.
- aanet - 10173 sekunder sedanJeff Dean leaving... as is Sir Demis...
What's happening?!
Have they had enough of Google?
- wmf - 15012 sekunder sedanHe's failing up and out of the blast zone. He won't be responsible if Gemini 4 fails.
- ddp26 - 14668 sekunder sedanI would have thought Jeff Dean would never ever leave Google. What on earth is going on?
- 0x70run - 13549 sekunder sedanmiss me with the AGI nonsense
- real-hacker - 12268 sekunder sedanAI hurts ads money. It's a classic Innovators' dillema.
- - 14913 sekunder sedan
- - 15004 sekunder sedan
- tanh - 15120 sekunder sedanI guess Demis was about world models and the old talent saw the writing on the wall. Noam was a big one and this is just a continuation of that.
Don’t understand how Sundar is still running things, though.
- Mistletoe - 12824 sekunder sedanLots of talk of us being at the cusp of AGI, but how will we even know when we get there? When AGI develops a religion for itself?
- rwalll - 10992 sekunder sedanReal next chapters:
1) Repair search that had been broken by AI initiatives.
2) Include less invasive AI with ads for those that need to be spoon fed.
3) Pretend to work on AGI and data centers in space.
4) Sell shovels and TPUs to the gold diggers.
- amberjack - 15951 sekunder sedanSo how many people from DeepMind have left now? Not looking too good for Google.
- - 16012 sekunder sedan
- VCFundedGenYer - 12519 sekunder sedanCan we please stop saying anything about "AGI"? I remember when people would be like "AGI in 3 months" / "AGI in 2024" / "AGI is confirmed in 2025" like stop, you don't know if it's even a thing, let alone if it's coming/imminent.
- paulpan - 13617 sekunder sedanHugely disappointing and shocking news. Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar. A move of this magnitude couldn't have been made without consent of Larry and Sergey, so it makes me wonder why from their perspective.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.
- sgt101 - 13727 sekunder sedan"Onwards!"
These guys...
- dude250711 - 12085 sekunder sedanThe momentum is not being conserved here.
- next_xibalba - 12234 sekunder sedanMy uninformed hypothesis: Demis was gently pushed out. Gemini, while having made major strides over the last year, continues to lag behind Anthropic and OpenAI.
- dyauspitr - 14866 sekunder sedanThis doesn’t sound like stepping down this sounds like stepping up within Google.
- ChrisArchitect - 15008 sekunder sedanRelated:
The next chapter of our AI momentum
- Handy-Man - 16232 sekunder sedanJeff and Sanjay both leaving!
- ChrisArchitect - 16532 sekunder sedan
- Balinares - 13880 sekunder sedanWell, damn. Jeff, Sanjay and Demis leaving all at once, it's hard not to read that as someone fucked up pretty bad.
- josefritzishere - 12860 sekunder sedanLet's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?
- jmyeet - 14518 sekunder sedanTwo thoughts on this.
First, it is incredibly difficult to pivot a large organization because there are too many competing interests, too many fiefdoms people have built and too much organizational inertia. A new company has the advantage of a singularity of purpose. Google has to compete with internal interests about AI disrupting search, ad revenue and so on. This can slow you down and limit the resources you get. It's why companies get disrupted, particularly when they reach monopoly status. Steve jobs said it best [1].
Second, Gogole's path here (IMHO) is to make their own hardware. They've already done this with their TPUs but need to be able to compete with NVidia offerings. NVidia controlling the price, features and, most importantly, who gets to buy them is bad for Google. This is what Google should be pouring billions into.
The beauty of this is that success is easily measurable against metrics like price-per-petaflops, performance-per-Watt and so on. Throw money at some key Nvidia engineers and have them design silicon for you for TSMC to fab.
I still believe that Google is positioned to survive the (IMHO) inevitable AI bubble popping.
- tcp_handshaker - 13967 sekunder sedanNo AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar.
If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?
- zuzululu - 16414 sekunder sedananybody watching the pace of output from Gemini team has been nothing but disappointing. meanwhile anthropic and openai has surpassed them.
I do wonder if anybody working at Google can give us an insight why the chaos and lack of competitiveness?
- sidcool - 14926 sekunder sedanSundar Pichai: @DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs.
https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093
So it's not stepping down, right?
- bkishan - 15949 sekunder sedanBy the article, it looks like he's actually stepping up.
- krembo - 12526 sekunder sedan[flagged]
- conartist6 - 14342 sekunder sedan[flagged]
- daun_gee - 12825 sekunder sedanAI is for retards.
- dominotw - 12257 sekunder sedanwhen you attack the king make sure to kill the king.
Demis tried to be google ceo by pumping out self aggrandizing 'documentaries' and highfalutin interviews where said a whole bunch of nothing.
- tough - 16025 sekunder sedanOh wow demis and Jeff, that Ethics engineer who left GDM, and reached to both and posted on lesswrong a couple weeks [1] ago did make a difference?
1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...