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Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis is now Chief Scientist of Alphabet and Chair of Google DeepMind. In bigger news, Jeff Dean has announced that he is stepping away from Google and is founding a new AI company called Discovery Loop.
These changes may be attributable to the departure of Jeff Dean, Google’s Chief Scientist for Google Research and DeepMind. Demis Hassabis is stepping into the role of Chief Scientist that Dean previously held.
Demis Hassabis
DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis has been the public face of DeepMind and he’ll continue to have a role at DeepMind but will also have a larger influence in the direction of Google’s AI divisions, including Isomorphic Labs.
Isomorphic Labs is an AI-based drug research division at Google that is focused on developing biopharmaceutical and pharmaceutical medicines. It is currently partnered with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novartis to develop pharmaceuticals, and Johnson & Johnson to develop biopharmaceuticals. It’s no surprise that Google is putting AI to use in discovering new ways to develop pharmaceuticals, as it is a trillion-dollar industry.
Koray Kavukcuoglu
Koray Kavukcuoglu previously held two positions: Chief Technology Officer of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google. He has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, responsible for day-to-day leadership at DeepMind. His responsibilities include the Gemini models and apps development teams and frontier models. He continues to hold the position of Google’s chief AI architect.
Sundar Pichai’s announcement explained:
“Koray has been at DeepMind since its early days, and over his 13 years there, he has started our deep learning team and led the way on breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN. I look forward to seeing him lead GDM into this next chapter.”
Jeff Dean Stepping Away Is A Big Deal
Jeff Dean has played a huge role at Google. He may not be well known by site owners and SEOs, but his inventions and contributions have played a major role in shaping how neural networks have been trained. He is one of the co-inventors of TensorFlow, one of the foundational software platforms that helped enable modern deep learning and, consequently, generative AI.
He was part of the team that showed how neural networks could learn meaningful high-level representations from millions of unlabeled data points and was one of the inventors of knowledge distillation (2015), a way to make a smaller AI model behave similarly to larger models. Distillation is a technique that Chinese companies have been accused of using to copy the top models from OpenAI and Anthropic and is a method that has been used to reverse engineer AI search results.
Major Research Papers
- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters (2004)
This paper paper was a strong influece in the development of Hadoop and helped enable the creation of the big-data industry. - Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data (2006)
Bigtable showed how structured data could be stored across thousands of servers and scale to the petabyte range, influencing web indexing at scale. - Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks (2012)
This paper introduced DistBelief, a direct predecessor to TensorFlow. DistBelief showed how to train models that contained billions of parameters. - Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network (2015) (link)
As previously mentioned, this is a way to teach a smaller AI to generate outputs similar in quality to a larger one. It also showed how to take combine multiple models into one model. It also introduced how to train smaller specialist models that can be rapidly trained. - TensorFlow: A System for Large-Scale Machine Learning (2016)
TensorFlow is the flexible infrastructure layer that enabled AI as we know it to develop.
Although many people in the SEO community may not know who Jeff Dean is, Jeff Dean has played a major behind the scene role in their lives in terms of what Google is today and the development of the entire AI ecosystem as it exists today.
Not to put too big a spin on this, but Jeff Dean stepping away from Google is a major development for Google and consequently for the SEO community.
According to Sundar Pichai:
“Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era.
On a personal note, it’s been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay, and I wish them all the best! We’ll continue to work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances.
Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era.
We’ll continue to work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances.”
Featured Image by Shutterstock/One Artist
