Google is hoping that an “organizational revolution” will put it back in the AI race, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. The search giant’s parent Alphabet last week “shocked Silicon Valley with news of a management shake-up.” Veteran DeepMind engineer Jeff Dean is leaving “to launch a startup with several top researchers,” introducing yet another competitor to the crowded AI scene. But the bigger news was that Demis Hassabis, who led Google DeepMind, would move on from his “day-to-day managerial role to become the chief scientist” of Alphabet. It’s not clear what happened, but people close to London-based DeepMind “suspect a fallout between the top brass.” Hassabis was always a scientist at heart. For him, the company and its vast resources were mostly “a means to achieving a bigger dream” of building intelligent machines “that could solve intractable scientific problems.” But in an industry where execs “are notorious for feigning interest in science, he never seemed to escape the sense that he was a scientist paying lip service to the commercial imperative.”
Dean’s departure is also significant, said Cade Metz in The New York Times. He’s been with Google since 1999—he was the company’s 30th employee—and “played a key role in creating the global computer network powering its search business” as well as being “one of the company’s early leaders in AI.” But like many prominent AI researchers, he was lured away “by a deep pool of venture funding and the chance to run his own company.” It seems Dean and the other researchers left on good terms—Alphabet has funded the company’s undisclosed seed round—but it raises questions about Google’s talent exodus. Dean was also “one of the few Silicon Valley executives to speak out” against the government’s immigration agenda, even as “Google has begun to work more closely with the Trump administration.”
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