5 ms·

It 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 d

by ra7 1mo ago

It 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.

brandall10 1mo ago
Yeah, a bit surprised that the top comments aren't discussing losing Dean, he's been a figurehead for the company for decades. It's like Apple losing Ive in a way. EDIT: "figurehead" - that's all I meant. A notable, public figure from the company who is credited with having a significant impact on its evolution. I'm not making a judgement call on his departure, or Ive's, being good or bad. That said... just give it a couple years, they'll be back in a lucrative aquihire.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1mo ago
  Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.
  - zem 1mo ago
    not true for jeff and sanjay - they kept moving from project to project and delivering transformative results in each.
  - re-thc 1mo ago
    > So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks. Who knows? Pure speculation? You can also say if Jobs was still around they could have 10x-ed it even further? Apple car could have been a thing? Apple could have been way ahead and actually competing in AI and data centers? Who knows what else Jobs could have came up with?
    - libria 1mo ago
      Not enough to make an obvious dent perhaps. Nobody says Cook-era the same way they say Ballmer-era.
  - dannyw 1mo ago
    The MacBooks certainly got a lot better and more usable. Anyone remember the touchpad MBP with no physical escape key and the butterfly keyboard? (Respect to many of Ive’s great legacy though)
    - phoghed 1mo ago
      I thought the touch bar was cool and useful, I’ve always remapped caps lock to escape though. Would like one with all the current physical keys plus a Touch Bar that you could do cool stuff with.
    - SkyMarshal 1mo ago
      Also the removal of actually useful things like the Magsafe power connector and SD card slot, in the service of unneeded marginal thinness.
  - LarsDu88 1mo ago
    Jony Ive wanted to chop down all the trees at De Anza Community College for something like 11 million dollars for an Apple event. There's a lot of ways he was demanding in the wrong ways for Apple
    - senderista 1mo ago
      Man, I'd never heard that story, so I verified it. Turns out it was about two dozen trees and 25 million dollars, just to put up a big tent for an Apple launch event. (Yes, the trees were removed.) What a tool, he just lost my respect.
      - Barbing 1mo ago
        > Ahead of the event, Ive pushed CEO Tim Cook to remove two dozen trees from the De Anza College campus next to the Flint Center for the Performing Arts to erect an extravagant white tent for the hands-on area. Such a gifted man… doing such an incredibly dumb thing. https://www.macworld.com/article/696590/apple-expose-jony-ive-departure-apple-watch-tent.html https://www.macworld.com/article/696590/apple-expose-jony-iv... Edit: - why’d Tim let him? - why’d the college let them, OK money, but couldn’t they have potted and replanted for just a few or a couple-dozen million more? - why not have a greater vision and build the extravagant tent to enclose the trees (wouldn’t be the only example of beautiful living indoor trees)? - why not choose a site that would accommodate without any tree removal? wtf?
        senderista 1mo ago
        Right? What an absolute cunt (I might be a bit biased because my dad was an arborist).
  - aleph_minus_one 1mo ago
    > Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. The position that I have rather often read on the internet is: Jonathan Ive did very good work at Apple as long as there was a counterpart who could steer his creative vision. This counterpart was of course Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs died, there wasn't such a counterpart anymore, so Ive's work for Apple got much worse.
    - mattm 1mo ago
      I think this is true more often than many people want to admit. One of the most famous examples being Lennon and McCartney. Even though they couldn't stand each other near the end that tension helped produce their best music. They never did anything comparable as solo musicians.
  - bmitc 1mo ago
    I have never understood what anyone has ever seen in Ive. He is a complete hack. He's never done anything interesting.
- re-thc 1mo ago
  > It's like Apple losing Ive in a way. Are you sure we should compare it like this? Not sure it implies what you think it does...
  - gffrd 1mo ago
    Tell us what we’re missing.
    - re-thc 1mo ago
      The other commenter said it, quoting "Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple." So the parent comment would imply that losing Dean is a good thing for Google, which is way less likely here.
- crossroadsguy 1mo ago
  Like Ive? So you mean it’s good for Google?
HarHarVeryFunny 1mo 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 1mo 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
  - kridsdale1 1mo ago
    Same thing happened to Yan LeCun. Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1mo ago
    Probably 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 1mo ago
      He 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
weatherlite 1mo ago
> as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet IS that a promotion or demotion ?
- HarHarVeryFunny 1mo ago
  To me the most significant part is that he's no longer in charge of DeepMind, the company he created, other than this "Chair" title which sounds meaningless. When DeepMind allowed Google to buy them, it obviously had some major immediate positives - access to compute and money - but it seems it should have been obvious that the agreement was too good to be true, that they would be allowed to continue independently on their blue sky research mission to create AGI without any external interference or pressure to create product. It seems that Hassabis and his DM co-founders eventually realized the mistake and tried to take DM private again starting c.2018, but of course this failed. https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby/ https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-de... Now Hassabis has lost control of DeepMind altogether, and it seems to me, as a total outsider, that this is the end of the DeepMind mission to create AGI, at least the Hassabis/Legg definition of AGI as human-level general intelligence, capable of creativity and scientific discovery. Hassabis had always, until very recently, said that he believed it would take a number of additional "Transformer-level" breakthroughs to achieve this type of human-level AGI, while still seeing an LLM as one component of if (which to me seems an admission that the goal has failed - a true human level AGI should be able to learn language, etc, using it's own continual learning mechanisms). It seems that DeepMind has now fully become the Google Gemini (LLM) division, trying to create a me-too product. In the early days of DeepMind, before Google, before LLMs, I remember a David Silver slide deck titled "Reward is all you need", referring to RL rewards, which I never agreed with (although Rich Sutton might), but does at least reflect the independent thinking at DM, and of course RL not only gave rise to AlphaGo, but has now become central to the continued improvement of LLMs. However, notably David Silver also left DeepMind earlier this year, to found his own startup focusing on RL-based continual learning, presumably feeling that there was no longer a place for that type of research/pursuit at DeepMind. Still, LLMs seem to be a destructive enough force on their own that perhaps it should be seen as a positive if research towards more powerful AGI appears to have had a major setback. As for the "Alphabet Chief Scientist" title, it seems somewhat irrelevant, as least as far as Google's pursuit of true AGI. Hassabis is the face of beneficial AI, having been Knighted and awarded a Nobel Prize for his work, and it would be a horrendous PR move for Alphabet not to at least appear to be treating him with respect, even if in fact this does reflect him being pushed aside.

by ra7 1mo ago

brandall10 1mo ago

Yeah, a bit surprised that the top comments aren't discussing losing Dean, he's been a figurehead for the company for decades. It's like Apple losing Ive in a way. EDIT: "figurehead" - that's all I meant. A notable, public figure from the company who is credited with having a significant impact on its evolution. I'm not making a judgement call on his departure, or Ive's, being good or bad. That said... just give it a couple years, they'll be back in a lucrative aquihire.

vjvjvjvjghv 1mo ago
Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.
- zem 1mo ago
  not true for jeff and sanjay - they kept moving from project to project and delivering transformative results in each.
- re-thc 1mo ago
  > So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks. Who knows? Pure speculation? You can also say if Jobs was still around they could have 10x-ed it even further? Apple car could have been a thing? Apple could have been way ahead and actually competing in AI and data centers? Who knows what else Jobs could have came up with?
  - libria 1mo ago
    Not enough to make an obvious dent perhaps. Nobody says Cook-era the same way they say Ballmer-era.
- dannyw 1mo ago
  The MacBooks certainly got a lot better and more usable. Anyone remember the touchpad MBP with no physical escape key and the butterfly keyboard? (Respect to many of Ive’s great legacy though)
  - phoghed 1mo ago
    I thought the touch bar was cool and useful, I’ve always remapped caps lock to escape though. Would like one with all the current physical keys plus a Touch Bar that you could do cool stuff with.
  - SkyMarshal 1mo ago
    Also the removal of actually useful things like the Magsafe power connector and SD card slot, in the service of unneeded marginal thinness.
- LarsDu88 1mo ago
  Jony Ive wanted to chop down all the trees at De Anza Community College for something like 11 million dollars for an Apple event. There's a lot of ways he was demanding in the wrong ways for Apple
  - senderista 1mo ago
    Man, I'd never heard that story, so I verified it. Turns out it was about two dozen trees and 25 million dollars, just to put up a big tent for an Apple launch event. (Yes, the trees were removed.) What a tool, he just lost my respect.
    - Barbing 1mo ago
      > Ahead of the event, Ive pushed CEO Tim Cook to remove two dozen trees from the De Anza College campus next to the Flint Center for the Performing Arts to erect an extravagant white tent for the hands-on area. Such a gifted man… doing such an incredibly dumb thing. https://www.macworld.com/article/696590/apple-expose-jony-ive-departure-apple-watch-tent.html https://www.macworld.com/article/696590/apple-expose-jony-iv... Edit: - why’d Tim let him? - why’d the college let them, OK money, but couldn’t they have potted and replanted for just a few or a couple-dozen million more? - why not have a greater vision and build the extravagant tent to enclose the trees (wouldn’t be the only example of beautiful living indoor trees)? - why not choose a site that would accommodate without any tree removal? wtf?
      - senderista 1mo ago
        Right? What an absolute cunt (I might be a bit biased because my dad was an arborist).
- aleph_minus_one 1mo ago
  > Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. The position that I have rather often read on the internet is: Jonathan Ive did very good work at Apple as long as there was a counterpart who could steer his creative vision. This counterpart was of course Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs died, there wasn't such a counterpart anymore, so Ive's work for Apple got much worse.
  - mattm 1mo ago
    I think this is true more often than many people want to admit. One of the most famous examples being Lennon and McCartney. Even though they couldn't stand each other near the end that tension helped produce their best music. They never did anything comparable as solo musicians.
- bmitc 1mo ago
  I have never understood what anyone has ever seen in Ive. He is a complete hack. He's never done anything interesting.
re-thc 1mo ago
> It's like Apple losing Ive in a way. Are you sure we should compare it like this? Not sure it implies what you think it does...
- gffrd 1mo ago
  Tell us what we’re missing.
  - re-thc 1mo ago
    The other commenter said it, quoting "Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple." So the parent comment would imply that losing Dean is a good thing for Google, which is way less likely here.
crossroadsguy 1mo ago
Like Ive? So you mean it’s good for Google?

HarHarVeryFunny 1mo 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 1mo 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
- kridsdale1 1mo ago
  Same thing happened to Yan LeCun. Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1mo ago
  Probably 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 1mo ago
    He 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

weatherlite 1mo ago

> as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet IS that a promotion or demotion ?

HarHarVeryFunny 1mo ago
To me the most significant part is that he's no longer in charge of DeepMind, the company he created, other than this "Chair" title which sounds meaningless. When DeepMind allowed Google to buy them, it obviously had some major immediate positives - access to compute and money - but it seems it should have been obvious that the agreement was too good to be true, that they would be allowed to continue independently on their blue sky research mission to create AGI without any external interference or pressure to create product. It seems that Hassabis and his DM co-founders eventually realized the mistake and tried to take DM private again starting c.2018, but of course this failed. https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby/ https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-de... Now Hassabis has lost control of DeepMind altogether, and it seems to me, as a total outsider, that this is the end of the DeepMind mission to create AGI, at least the Hassabis/Legg definition of AGI as human-level general intelligence, capable of creativity and scientific discovery. Hassabis had always, until very recently, said that he believed it would take a number of additional "Transformer-level" breakthroughs to achieve this type of human-level AGI, while still seeing an LLM as one component of if (which to me seems an admission that the goal has failed - a true human level AGI should be able to learn language, etc, using it's own continual learning mechanisms). It seems that DeepMind has now fully become the Google Gemini (LLM) division, trying to create a me-too product. In the early days of DeepMind, before Google, before LLMs, I remember a David Silver slide deck titled "Reward is all you need", referring to RL rewards, which I never agreed with (although Rich Sutton might), but does at least reflect the independent thinking at DM, and of course RL not only gave rise to AlphaGo, but has now become central to the continued improvement of LLMs. However, notably David Silver also left DeepMind earlier this year, to found his own startup focusing on RL-based continual learning, presumably feeling that there was no longer a place for that type of research/pursuit at DeepMind. Still, LLMs seem to be a destructive enough force on their own that perhaps it should be seen as a positive if research towards more powerful AGI appears to have had a major setback. As for the "Alphabet Chief Scientist" title, it seems somewhat irrelevant, as least as far as Google's pursuit of true AGI. Hassabis is the face of beneficial AI, having been Knighted and awarded a Nobel Prize for his work, and it would be a horrendous PR move for Alphabet not to at least appear to be treating him with respect, even if in fact this does reflect him being pushed aside.