What Just Happened at Google DeepMind?

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Happy Wednesday.

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The current thing in tech and business is Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis stepping down as DeepMind’s leader.

Today’s Lineup

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein at 11:45 AM
Blackberry CEO John J. Giamatteo at 12:00 PM
Circle Co-Founder & CEO Jeremy Allaire at 12:20 PM
Ambrook Co-Founder & CEO Mackenzie Burnett at 12:40 PM

Run of Show

What Just Happened at Google DeepMind?

This morning, Demis Hassabis announced that he’s stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind, and taking on the roles of GDM Chairman and Alphabet’s Chief Scientist.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that GDM Chief Scientist Jeff Dean will be leaving the company after a 27-year run to start, along with Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, a public benefit corporation “to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering”.

GDM CTO and Google’s Chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu is being promoted to SVP and will lead DeepMind.

On X, Demis says that the move will “allow [him] to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into [his] work at Isomorphic to help cure disease.” He fleshed this out more on Google’s blog:

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…In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters, and to advise Koray, Josh, and the GDM leads, from our awesome new London Platform 37 offices. As part of this transition, I’ll also be leaning into my role at Isomorphic, where we are making extremely rapid and promising progress, to accelerate our mission there even faster. As you’ve heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.

It’s also worth remembering the last substantial thing Demis put out there: his “Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age”, in which he argues for a frontier AI standards body that evaluates frontier models before they’re released for risks associated with superintelligence. It’s not crazy to assume that Demis’ new role at Alphabet is related to what he’s advocating for in this essay.

The shakeup at Google just hit the timeline a few hours ago, so there will be lots more to come in the days ahead. We’ll be discussing all this on today’s show.

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