Jeff Dean leaving Alphabet

250

llouiereederson about 2 hours ago 52 commentsRead Article on nytimes.com

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Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wy1981•about 1 hour ago

Jeff Dean, Sanjay, et al have achieved so much. I'm very happy for them. Truly deserving.

Sometimes I couldn't resist wondering if I'll ever do work that has a tenth of the impact of theirs.

closetheloopdev•23 minutes ago

With the top AI personnel leaving Google, I wonder what will happen to their Gemini. Right now they still have a lead in inference hardware with TPUs but with both Anthropic and OpenAI developing their own chips, I wonder how long until either one will catch up.

flakiness•about 1 hour ago

To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup. They truly deserve it, but I don't expect a huge success as a business.

That said, I hope they write cool papers with various peers across the industry without worrying too much about the competing dynamics. That'd be a blessing for humanity, and good for their spirit.

canes123456•about 1 hour ago

A public benefit corp shouldn’t be a start up. The primary goal of a start up is to grow as quickly as possible which is rarely benefits the public.

Very silly to call every non start up a lifestyle business. It’s just a business. Start up are the weird thing that almost always an obscene waste of time and money, but sometime creates google.

flakiness•39 minutes ago

Fair point. Their page doesn't list any investors.

valleyer•9 minutes ago

The Times article lists several.

tonfa•about 1 hour ago

> To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup

They're also incredibly productive and can build/deliver really good stuff, so who knows :)

ValentineC•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if Jeff Dean facts [1] (I hope people remember the reference) will carry over to the new startup.

[1] https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts

hoyd•about 1 hour ago

«Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi.»

I had not read this before, but told many students the same about my PIN code and I a quiz about the last digits. Love it.

soVeryTired•40 minutes ago

0000 in base pi. Oh Jeff.

tcp_handshaker•28 minutes ago

Those are all fake, part of an internal Google narrative that overstates individual contribution, and obscures the work of large engineering teams.

Here are some Jeff Dean well sourced facts:

- Already part of engineering of Google indexing systems that lacked basic checksums and ran on non-ECC hardware, allowing silent data corruption.

- One of the authors of LevelDB a database with so many documented crash-consistency, recovery, and data-loss weaknesses for years. Just check their Github project. LevelDB current tracker contains unresolved crash consistency, recovery and corruption reports going back almost 12 years on GitHub

- In AI engineering technical lead, let TensorFlow lose researcher mind share to PyTorch, and caused Google fragmented landscape across TensorFlow and JAX.

- Had the people at Google who invented the Transformer architecture, but failed, to turn that lead into the first dominant public LLM.

- As AI engineering and VP management let Google Brain and DeepMind remain duplicated and internally competitive for too long.

- Let Noam Shazeer leave and then spent heavily to bring him back with nothing to show for.

- Part of Technical VP leadership who had Bard rushed to launch with factual errors in Google own promotional material.

- The first Gemini demonstration overstated how real-time and interactive the system actually was, being basically a fake.

- Part of the VP and AI technical leadership who had Google AI Overviews launched with weak source quality controls and repeated satire and low-quality web content as factual advice.

- Part of teams that launched AlphaChip performance claims that were difficult for outside researchers to reproduce and remain technically disputed.

- Jeff Dean public explanation of Gebru departure was contested and damaged confidence in Google scientific governance.

- Jeff Dean was part of the team at Google that removed or marginalized prominent internal AI ethics critics shortly before many of their warnings became product problems.

- Jeff Dean was one of the managers behind Project Dragonfly supporting censorship.

- Jeff Dean is part of the VP technical leadership approving Project Nimbus supporting an ongoing genocide.

bonsai_bar•9 minutes ago

You sound like you're quite jealous of him.

mitchbob•about 2 hours ago

https://archive.ph/Pogl7

segmondy•about 1 hour ago

End of an era for Alphabet.

abirch•about 1 hour ago

I give it a 51% chance of Discovery Loop being acquired by Google

aix1•39 minutes ago

I actually think there's a low probability of that.

The four have so much influence within the company that they could have trivially set this up as part of Alphabet, if they wanted to. They are also ridiculously wealthy.

comment0r•44 minutes ago

They are already partially funded by Google.

ExMachina73•about 1 hour ago

Just remember to make sure you turn in your devices.

calufa•about 1 hour ago

As LLM coding agents plateau— at least for the average engineer without tens of thousands of dollars or swarms of agents to run —I’d say that, from here on it’s going to be about ASICs, specialized LoRA/or-equivalent models, or a Ruby on Rails for LLM context engineering and orchestration, which LangChain and others seems well position, including Google as they own the entire stack. LLM free lunch has been over for a while, perhaps since the ReAct loop, and has been official since Ilya mentioned it at NeurIPS.

I feel the most exciting development these days is self-evolving agents. Especially if you have a way to verify their outputs with a formal system, or with a system developed since the 60s by armies of PhDs.

DeepMinds Gnome is a good example, where they use DFT to verify outputs. Approximating NP-problems is always fun for those who dare.

I am also building in this space. Its a mix between HPC, AI, and hard science. Pretty fun compared to waking everyday to LLM news that seem more like marketing stunts.

aoeusnth1•about 1 hour ago

Sounds like you get your news from 2024 when people thought things were plateauing after GPT4?

zuzululu•about 1 hour ago

we definitely haven't hit plateau yet. I think a lot of people latch on to anti-LLM narratives without really thinking things through.

deeviant•about 1 hour ago

LLM coding isn't even close to plateauing. Right now, the major players are in a consolidation step, focusing more on economic efficiency but still not at the point where we're ready to start burning models to hardware and freezing the line.

They are straddling the line between pushing it forward, and justifying the business case. It's hard to do both at the same time.

calufa•about 1 hour ago

LLMs are hungry for tokens. Every day I see more startups claiming token usage at 50-100k per month. You can always brute-force your way in - just see HuggingFace's recent attacks.

If throwing more money at inference while accumulating compounding technical debt is the new norm, then we are not solving the problem, and the solution space is already covered.

Perhaps there are marginal gains at the expense of quadrillion-params LLM models with 10x the cost and energy. We are simply making inefficiency more expensive, camouflaged by VC money and great marketing.

If that is not plateauing, then I guess I will have to reconsider what plateauing means.

guessmyname•28 minutes ago

Careers page (if anyone is interested) → https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Discovery-Loop

brcmthrowaway•27 minutes ago

I don't see the salary (on mobile). Isn't there a law stating it must be added?

guessmyname•19 minutes ago

Only California employers with 15 or more employees have to post a pay range (Senate Bill 1162 [1], effective Jan 1, 2023) [2][3]. Discovery Loop employs only four people (that we know of), so it isn’t required to disclose a salary range in its job posts, of which there is only one [4].

[1] https://hr.ucmerced.edu/hr-units/talent-acquisition/senate-b...

[2] https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2023/03/pay-transparency-...

[3] https://www.jazzhr.com/blog/pay-transparency

[4] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Discovery-Loop

quaintdev•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with it

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...

next_xibalba•about 1 hour ago

Doubtful. His destination is both funded by Google and has a compute deal with Google.

montebicyclelo•about 1 hour ago

Did the ycombinator podcast which included giving advice to startup founders just a few days ago:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Vy-jeff-dean-the-1-rule-...

xnx•about 1 hour ago

As always, a very good presentation.

asimpletune•about 1 hour ago

They're structuring the new company as public benefit corporation.

an0malous•44 minutes ago

Does this mean anything besides for corporate virtue signaling?

constantinum•19 minutes ago

In 2018 there was a beautiful New Yorker article on Jeff Dean and Sanjay https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

OutOfHere•19 minutes ago

I wish them well, but this firm will likely fail miserably. The value is in having access to real world hardware platforms that AI can drive, not in the AI that does their driving. There exist plenty of harnesses already. These people couldn't even get Google to build a top LLM.

cosinetau•about 1 hour ago

Same day Google is rolling out layoffs.

lotsofpulp•about 1 hour ago

Alphabet has almost 200k employees, it would be surprising if they weren't constantly laying off a ton of people (and hiring them).

xnx•about 1 hour ago

I've seen tiny tiny hints from the outside that Jeff Dean was dealing with too much internal BS. Two examples that come to mind: Having to deal with Timnit Gebru fiasco, and even chips in the TPU series getting marketing names (Trillium and Ironwood) before switching back to more standard numbering.

compiler-guy•about 1 hour ago

I have no doubt that internal Google friction is one of the reasons they are moving. But the Gebru incident was almost seven years ago now. It is very unlikely to be a proximate cause.

I doubt numbering vs names on TPU releases even crosses Jeff's radar. It's not the kind of thing he cares about.

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

The next chapter of our AI momentum

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755

ChrisArchitect•44 minutes ago

Discovery Loop

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184960

Balinares•about 1 hour ago

Well, damn. Jeff, Sanjay and Demis leaving all at once, it's hard not to read that as someone fucked up pretty bad.

sva_•about 1 hour ago

Hassabis isn't leaving

Balinares•about 1 hour ago

Ah, you're right. Thanks for the correction. I read that other post too fast.

Handy-Man•about 2 hours ago

Jeff and Sanjay both leaving!

ndr•about 1 hour ago

Imagine being a VC and getting to this slide on their pitch deck, "involved in creating the following":

https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2085036253263921218

drcongo•about 2 hours ago

Not through conscience.

tough•about 2 hours ago

Oh wow demis and Jeff, that Ethics engineer who left GDM, and reached to both and posted on lesswrong a couple weeks [1] ago did make a difference?

1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...

cma•about 1 hour ago

Alex Turner discusses a bit here at this timestamp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGlJQHVeKIA&t=14m27s

TulliusCicero•about 1 hour ago

...you think they've only been planning this for a couple weeks?

tough•about 1 hour ago

hmm not really, and it probably isnt the origin, but im glad to see him vindicated by having both C-level google leadership people who targeted to try and either stop google from doing the pentagon deal, both stepping down the same day.

At least it makes me feel like he reaching out might have made a difference on remembering this people killer robots are bad, and being part of it might not be on the best of their interests to go down on history for

bkishan•about 2 hours ago

what was the post?

tough•about 2 hours ago

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...