The Demis firewall
Why the Google DeepMind shakeup matters less than it looks, except for one change. Also: Checking in with Figma's CEO, OpenAI's Hugging Face postmortem, and more.
Inside Google DeepMind, today’s executive shakeup landed with more or less a shrug. Demis Hassabis handing day-to-day control of the lab to Koray Kavukcuoglu was closer to a formality than a bombshell, people there tell me, and while Jeff Dean’s exit stings, it’s being processed internally as more of a spiritual departure than a strategic one.
That’s not how the outside world took it. Alphabet shed 4 percent on the news that Demis is moving up to GDM chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, that Koray is stepping up as an SVP reporting to Sundar Pichai, and that Jeff is leaving after 27 years, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, to start Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation that wants to automate scientific discovery itself. The take writes itself: Google is losing the pillars of its AI efforts at the worst possible moment.
People I’ve talked to inside Google say Koray has been the main guy on the models for at least a year (Demis’s his own memo to employees essentially says this: “the Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while”), and Demis has become increasingly less interested in shipping chatbot features and refereeing Google’s endless internal compute allocation fights.
Where his head has been instead:
