Demis Hassabis will no longer be Google DeepMind’s CEO, according to breaking news from Axios today.
It’s not the only change. Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and three other senior researchers are leaving to start Discovery Loop, a company that will pursue automated scientific research. TechCrunch adds:
The startup is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI (a process known as recursive self-improvement), which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely.
Axios focuses the article on company dynamics: it’s not keeping up with OpenAI and Anthropic, several prominent researchers have already left, there are reports of low employee morale, and Google stock has fallen.
I’m more interested in Hassabis’s quote:
I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.
A year ago, Hassabis said that we don’t understand AI, that we don’t have a technical design to make very powerful models safe, and that — even if we did — it could still be “existential for humanity” if anyone built it in a different way. So yes, it’s “critical that we collectively get the next steps right.” But it doesn’t seem like we’re anywhere near a path to do that ... unless we enact a global pause on the race to develop more and more powerful models before we can steer them.
Hassabis will now act as chief scientist for Google’s parent company Alphabet, and also as Google DeepMind’s chairman. This means he’ll be less involved in management and more involved in long-term vision setting. In my view, he should drop the corporate “discovery and wonder” stump speech and start seriously lobbying for that global pause.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.