News broke on August 5th that Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day operations at Google DeepMind and that four other Google AI luminaries have also departed to found Discover Loop, a new research-focused startup. Alphabet’s stock experienced an immediate drop of around 4%, a loss of some $170 billion in market capitalization, reflecting deep investor concern.
Demis Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 nd sold it to Google for an estimated $650 million in 2014, isn’t parting company with Google. Instead two new titles have been created for him: Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, both of which give him a continuing role in overseeing the further evolution of AI. He will also be able to devote more time to research into applying AI to medicine and curing complex diseases with Isomorphic Labs, the London-based start-up he founded in 2021, with financial backing from Alphabet.
Last month, Hassabis issued a warning that highly powerful AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and that humanity needs to do more to prepare. Calling for a US-led coalition to act as a watchdog, he posted on Substack:
“What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilisation unfolds. By safely stewarding AGI into the world, we can enter a new golden age of scientific discovery and progress, and usher in a bright future of incredible human flourishing.”
In his message to DeepMind on August 5th he wrote:
We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.
With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.
Hassabis is being replaced at Google DeepMind by its CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, who has been with DeepMind for 13 years and moved from London to Mountain View last year, taking up the additional role as Alphabet’s Chief AI Architect. He will oversee Gemini model development which is likely to be steered more directly at products, in particular Cloud-related ones.
Since the merger of Google Brain and DeepMind in 2023, there had been a two-center split in Google AI efforts with DeepMind researchers being predominantly in London and working in a different time frame. The reshuffle concentrates Google’s AI leadership in Mountain View and sees the departure of other London veterans. David Silver, best known for Alpha-Go, has left to launch a startup called Ineffable Intelligence and Simon Bouton, DeepMind’s Chief Experience Officer, is planning to join London-based CuspAI.
DeepMind has also suffered the departure of its Chief Scientist, Jeff Dean, who was a co-founder of Google Brain and had been with Google for 27 years, and Oriol Vinyals, former VP of Research at DeepMind and a technical lead on the Gemini models. Together with two other prominent Google AI researchers, Google Brain co-founder and former DeepMind scientist, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat, a Senior Fellow with 25 years at Google, they are the founders of Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on ML-driven scientific research. Its website proclaims.
Our mission is straightforward: we are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering. By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster. Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people’s lives on a global scale.
From left: Oriol Vinyals, Sanjay Ghemawat , Jeff Dean Quoc Le
Rather than building consumer-facing chatbots or large language models for enterprise apps, Discovery Loop is focused on deploying AI to propose, execute, analyze, and iterate on parallel experiments autonomously. If this can be made to work it can then be applied to domains like chip design, material science, drug discovery, and cybersecurity and very much continues in the footsteps of DeepMind.
Discovery Loop is starting out with the benefit of Google support with Alphabet serving as a founding institutional investor alongside venture capital firms such as Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures and Google providing the startup with specialized cloud computing infrastructure, including Google Cloud and TPU/GPU hardware resources, for at least its first year of operation. This is due to a partnership between Google and Discovery Loop to collaborate on machine learning systems and compute infrastructure advances, an agreement that allows Alphabet to maintain strategic access to the technical breakthroughs made by Dicovrey Loop while permitting it to operate independently as a public benefit corporation.
By backing both Isomorphic Labs and DiscoveryLoop and Alphabet still has a stake in reseach efforts initiated by DeeepMind. But what will become of other of its ongoing projects. Ealier this month I reported that Google has released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of AI models that take us ever closer towards intelligent robots. Will this research still find a foothold in the reshuffled Google DeepMind?
It is hard not to see these changes as the bean counters taking over the research lab. DeepMind was at the forefront of AI research mainly due to the vision of Hassabis and the team he gathered around him. It is difficult to see this research ethos continuing in the future, and it looks very much as though Google is about to eat its own seed corn.
More Information
Google Blog, August 5th: The next chapter of our AI momentum
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