A current Google employee, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said one of the changes \u2014 Dean\u2019s departure \u2014 is an example of \u201cthe vestiges of Google\u2019s idealism\u201d fully dying out. \u201cLosing Jeff continues the brain drain at Google,\u201d they said. \u201cMediocrity is the likely result.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wednesday\u2019s news rocked the AI industry, which is difficult to do during an era when AI researchers are constantly switching between roles and labs like a game of musical chairs. Google announced that Demis Hassabis is stepping away from DeepMind\u2019s day-to-day operations to focus on AGI and research; Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind\u2019s current CTO, will step up to lead DeepMind in Hassabis\u2019 place. At the same time, Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and the company\u2019s 30th employee, will leave the organization alongside three top Google AI researchers to form a new AI startup.<\/p>\n
\u201cLosing Jeff continues the brain drain at Google. Mediocrity is the likely result.\u201d<\/p>\n
Google is widely viewed as being the most successful of the established tech giants in the AI race, far surpassing progress by Meta, Amazon, and Apple. But Google is still viewed as slower-moving than OpenAI and Anthropic, and it certainly hasn\u2019t lapped them in frontier models. Both Hassabis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made that point in their statements.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve,\u201d Pichai wrote, adding, \u201cWe have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here.\u201d Hassabis wrote that the company is entering a \u201cnext chapter\u201d and that it has \u201call the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will.\u201d<\/p>\n
Key figures in the AI industry seemed to view the changes as Hassabis stepping to the side in favor of a faster-moving, product-focused push at GDM.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been far more internal competition at Google than I\u2019ve seen in the last decade primarily around the AI product space,\u201d one former Google employee, who recently left the company and had knowledge of Google\u2019s AI operations, told The Verge. They added that there\u2019s been pressure to hire more employees who can speed up launches of more products, in keeping with the intensifying competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been far more internal competition at Google than I\u2019ve seen in the last decade primarily around the AI product space.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another source within the AI industry, who requested anonymity due to ongoing work with AI labs, said, \u201cI agree with everyone\u2019s read that this is a sign of Demis\u2019 loss of influence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hassabis hasn\u2019t been quiet in sharing that his interests lie in the scientific advancements that could come from AI, perhaps more so than the commercialization of the technology. Pichai wrote in a blog post<\/a> that Hassabis\u2019 next move will focus on \u201cactively shaping the future of AGI\u201d as DeepMind chair and Alphabet\u2019s chief scientist, while continuing his role leading the drug-discovery spinoff Isomorphic Labs<\/a>.<\/p>\n But AI leadership is only one of the problems facing Google \u2014 and industry insiders The Verge spoke with kept coming back to one main question: How much of this had to do with increasing ethical conflicts within Google itself?<\/p>\n A contributing factor to both Hassabis\u2019s role change and Dean\u2019s departure may have been Google\u2019s deal with the Department of Defense, Tyler Johnston, founder of the nonprofit AI industry watchdog The Midas Project, told The Verge. That deal could potentially allow for the use of Google AI in mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n \u201cThis has already caused staff departures and a unionization effort at DeepMind,\u201d Johnston said. \u201cThere are many signs suggesting Dean and Hassabis may have personally felt opposed. In fact, DeepMind was initially acquired by Google with an agreement not to sell the technology for military or intelligence purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n Zvi Mowshowitz, a blogger followed closely by AI researchers, echoed<\/a> that Dean\u2019s decision to leave could potentially be \u201crelated to Google\u2019s decisions on the DoW contract.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDeepMind was initially acquired by Google with an agreement not to sell the technology for military or intelligence purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n Dean is leaving to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup that aims to automate thousands of science and engineering experiments in areas like drug discovery, hardware design, clean energy, and material design. Joining him as cofounders are three additional top Google AI researchers: Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals.<\/p>\n \u201cLosing Jeff feels like a blow for morality and basic human decency within Google,\u201d the current Google employee said. \u201cHe was one of the few remaining visible, powerful figures here who was willing to speak out on moral issues such as ICE agents executing American citizens, AI surveillance, and autonomous lethal weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n Dean was one of the most high-profile dissenters to the Department of Defense\u2019s labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk<\/a> after the company stood firm on its red lines<\/a> for military use of its AI. In March, Dean was one of dozens of tech industry leaders and employees to file an amicus brief in support of Anthropic\u2019s lawsuit, laying out concerns over the Trump administration\u2019s decision \u2014 as well as about AI\u2019s risks and implications. (He also pushed back on the Trump administration in January<\/a>, saying that ICE\u2019s killing of Alex Pretti was \u201cabsolutely shameful\u201d and that \u201cevery person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.\u201d)<\/p>\n In April, after Anthropic\u2019s drawn-out fight with the DoD over its red lines \u2014 prohibiting domestic mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons (with no human in the loop) \u2014 Google became one of the companies<\/a> to happily fill the gap left by Anthropic\u2019s Pentagon blacklisting. Like a handful of other companies, Google signed on to allow the Pentagon to use its AI for \u201cany lawful use.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeff Dean had publicly disavowed both the same red lines as Anthropic in the past.<\/p>\n Dean had publicly disavowed both the same red lines in the past. In February, he wrote<\/a> on X, \u201cMass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Surveillance systems are prone to misuse for political or discriminatory purposes.\u201d And in 2018, both Dean and Hassabis signed a public pledge<\/a> disavowing lethal autonomous weapons: \u201cWe the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine.\u201d<\/p>\n Alex Turner, a Google researcher who quit over the company\u2019s Pentagon deal, wrote in an op-ed<\/a> last month that Dean\u2019s \u201cdeparture would be a disaster for the company\u201d and that \u201cby signing [the amicus brief], he broke from the company line, which probably made things awkward within the C-suite.\u201d<\/p>\n In the amicus brief that Dean signed earlier this year, the group wrote, \u201cWe build, train, and study the large-scale AI systems that serve a wide range of users and deployments, including in the consequential domains of national security, law enforcement, and military operations.\u201d The group described itself as \u201cprofessionals with direct knowledge of what these systems can and cannot do, and what is at stake when their deployment outpaces the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern them.\u201d<\/p>\n Dean\u2019s departure may remove a high-profile critic, but it certainly won\u2019t dispel criticism within the organization as a whole. Since the beginning of the year, an increasing number of Google employees have expressed discontent with the organization\u2019s politics<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSergey [Brin] did a 180 politically, Sundar stood behind Trump at his inauguration,\u201d the current Google employee said. \u201cNow one of the only remaining figures at the company willing to speak out on moral issues is gone. 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