Google's AI organization underwent a shakeup on Wednesday, marked by the departure of several key figures and a restructuring of leadership roles within Alphabet and DeepMind.
Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, announced his departure from the company after 27 years. Dean, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, is leaving Google to start Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation backed by Google.
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Leadership restructuring at DeepMind and Alphabet
Demis Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold the unit to Google four years later, is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become chairman of the division. Hassabis will assume the newly created role of chief scientist at Alphabet.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently DeepMind's technology chief and Alphabet's chief AI architect, will take over the daily management of the DeepMind division and the development of the next Gemini model.
This transition follows the departure of Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' who left Google for OpenAI in June.
Enterprise performance and compute priorities
Despite the leadership changes, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated that 90% of Fortune 100 companies are using Gemini Enterprise. Google also reported 82% revenue growth in its cloud division.
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Pichai noted that Google's 'first priority' is securing the compute required to compete in frontier AGI development. The company currently sells its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to external customers, such as Anthropic.
Market and industry perspectives
Market reactions and analyst views offer varying perspectives on the shifts. Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, said researchers are 'interested in being part of history' rather than 'commercializing AI.'
Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management and a Google shareholder, noted that Google must decide how to allocate resources across its various businesses.
Regarding enterprise needs, Tomasz Tunguz, founder of Theory Ventures, said 'many of the models that are reasonable are good enough' for most enterprise demand.
