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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 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.

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> 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

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Same thing happened to Yan LeCun.

Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.

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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.
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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.

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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.
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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)

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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
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> 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?

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Like Ive? So you mean it’s good for Google?
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> 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...

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Tell us what we’re missing.
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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.

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