Author: Quantum Bit

OMG Google you scared me:

Just now, Jeff Dean announced his departure to start a business.

No need to rub your eyes, it’s him, the legendary Google figure, chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, head of Gemini, and one of only two Senior Google Fellows (position level L11), Jeff Dean.

The other L11 is Sanjay Ghemawat, one of the partners recently announced by my brother-in-law...

△Center position occupied by the two L11 big shots

The other two in the photo are also not unfamiliar faces, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, both of whom can be considered big shots that academic newcomers can look up to.

This is not over, at the same time it was announced that Google DeepMind CEO Hassabis has stepped down from his original position to serve as chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and will focus on AGI long-term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs.

Hassabis’s original responsibilities will be taken over by his long-term deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu. The latter has been promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind and will report directly to Hassabis.

Upon the news, Google’s stock price immediately dropped by 4%, evaporating $186 billion, approximately 1.34 trillion yuan.

Google Legend Leaves to Start a Business

Jeff Dean's startup is called Discovery Loop, positioned as a non-profit company, with the mission to achieve automation in machine learning, science, and engineering.

The founding members are all Google AI veterans:

• Jeff Dean: co-founder of Google Brain, Google chief scientist, head of Gemini;

• Sanjay Ghemawat: member of the National Academy of Engineering, longtime collaborator of Jeff Dean, involved in foundational infrastructures like Google File System, MapReduce, Bigtable;

• Quoc Le: co-founder of Google Brain, co-author of important achievements such as seq2seq and thought chain.

• Oriol Vinyals: vice president of research at Google DeepMind and head of deep learning, co-head of Gemini, involved in projects like seq2seq, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold.

It can be said that these individuals nearly cover the two most important technological mainlines of Google over the past 20 years—large-scale computing infrastructure and modern AI.

However, this heavyweight quartet leaving did not lead to a falling out with Google. On the contrary, Google CEO Hassabis offered his congratulations immediately, revealing that Google has invested in this new company and will become its cloud partner.

Yet within this decorum, it may not be without bitterness—

According to reports from Wired, after Jeff Dean and others expressed their intention to leave, Hassabis desperately tried to retain them, hoping they could keep their Google IDs. But in the end, the quartet felt that the fun and freedom of starting a new company were more important.

Wired quoted Vinyals as saying:

In a large company, to make any fundamental change, you always have to overcome a lot of inertia.

We want to create something different.

Currently, the funding amount and valuation of Discovery Loop have not been disclosed. However, any one of these four individuals would be shocking enough, let alone all four together... calling it the most luxurious entrepreneurial lineup of the moment would not be an exaggeration.

Wired also revealed that this new company has not yet begun to form a team and hasn’t even rented office space.

Now that the news is out, everything has come to light, and more Google talent will probably follow suit, leaving the giant struggling with large model deliveries and talent competition.

By the way, by now, the three main leaders of Gemini, Jeff Dean, Oriol Vinyals, and Noam Shazeer, have confirmed their departures from Google.

Reorganization of Google's AI Power Structure

On another front, Hassabis's new move indicates that Google has begun to reorganize its internal AI power structure.

Hassabis will no longer be responsible for the day-to-day operations of Google DeepMind, but has been promoted to chairman and chief scientist of Alphabet, focusing primarily on AGI long-term strategy, social impact, scientific research, and Isomorphic Labs—the drug development company previously spun off from DeepMind.

Google has also stated that Hassabis will directly discuss global and strategic AGI issues with Google CEO Hassabis. This seems to expand his scope of topics but reduces his direct execution responsibilities.

Reuters has reported that after Hassabis's transition, there will not be many direct subordinates.

Hassabis's original tasks will be handed over to his deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu, including development of Gemini models/applications and cutting-edge AI research. Furthermore, Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Hassabis.

This seems to indicate that the unified command from research to products will further converge to Google CEO himself.

△Koray Kavukcuoglu

In fact, with the delayed release of Google's new flagship version of Gemini, Google has already faced tremendous pressure from OpenAI and Anthropic in the competition for core AI talent.

The loss of core AI talent is one manifestation of this.

• On June 18, the core author of the Transformer, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI again.
• On June 19, Hassabis's longtime collaborator and Nobel Prize winner John Jumper transferred to Anthropic.
• On June 24, two core contributors to Gemini announced their move to Anthropic, namely Jonas Adler from the AI programming direction and Alexander Pritzel from the pre-training team.

……

It is understandable that Google is anxious.

The problem is that competition in large models demands more centralized and rapid organizational execution, yet next-generation technological breakthroughs often depend on having substantial autonomy for a few top researchers.

In the past, Google has not missed opportunities: Tibo, head of Codex, recently revealed that Google had mastered the relevant technology a year before the release of ChatGPT.

However, “Google was too nervous to release it, and DeepMind was prohibited from launching products that might impact Google's business.”

Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun; it’s just unexpected that even Google could experience such a day of “innovator's dilemma.”

Now, a legendary figure Jeff Dean has left, not retiring, not stepping back after achieving success, but exiting during a tumultuous phase that has not yet ended.

The larger storms may have just begun in even more grassroots places...

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