DeepMind's frontier work has become an all-consuming operation

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:37

   So it's both an opportunity and a difficulty to give one example of that. We haven't talked since there were some leadership changes that I wanted to ask you about at Google DeepMind. Demis Asabas, the CO, stepping back, becoming chief scientist, and also focusing more on isomorphic, which I'm very curious about. And then And Corey, you know, being elevated, running DeepMind, Jeff Dean, Google. Legend leaving to start Discovery Loop.

2. 16:03

   And, you know, when that happened, there was a lot of press about that and intrigue about what was going on behind the scenes. I haven't heard you or anyone named there speak on it since then, so I'd be curious to hear from you. Maybe you can put some of the rumors to rest. What was the thinking there? What motivated that? Why did that happen? You know, you're seeing some natural evolutions as people spend their time doing things for a while.

3. 16:30

   Jeff was 27 years, I believe. 27 years. It's a long time. I feel proud I've worked together with Jeff for a long time, a long time. You know, obviously, he was seminal in his contributions here, and we are excited to see what he does with Discovery Loop. You know, I would start with saying he definitely wanted, I think, a moment in time where he saw an opportunity to go do something, which he was excited by with a set of people.

4. 16:55

   The change internally, I would just say, you're going through a moment in the industry where the frontier model development is an all-consuming thing, right? We've had broad AI research, AGI research, and so on. But frontier model development is all-consuming. It's moving. It's picking up pace, right? And it's a very scaled operation, all the way from data to compute to the algorithmic work you do to managing the teams and your model agents to do that.

5. 17:31

   So I think it's become an important job on its whole. Demis, he's obviously been thinking about this moment for a long time. He's particularly interested in both how do you go through this frontier moment safely and how do you apply it to solve other problems. It's part of the work that he did with AlphaFold and hence what we are doing now with isomorphic are examples of how you can apply, you know, AGI to solve other problems.

6. 18:03

   Medicine, drug discovery, yeah. Yeah, robotics and so on. Like, you know, it'll apply to everything. So I think he wants to spend more of his time. So he's very leaned in into those things. Which if you know Demas, you know he's always been passionate about that. Passionate about it and he has been at it early on. And I think in some ways both seeing that the model development is kind of a well-established process and Cori has been a deep mine for well over a decade too.

7. 18:35

   And so we saw this opportunity for Cori to step up, do that, allows Demis. Demis is still involved as chair of DeepMind, but he's also spending a lot more time. You've seen him more involved with AI security conversations, but as well as thinking about how to apply AI in a more practical way, be it science, be it healthcare, and there'll be other areas as well. Does this signal any kind of shift with how DeepMind relates to the rest of Google?

8. 19:04

   Is it merging in closer? Yeah, what are the natural next order effects of this? There's been a natural process over many years, including when Demis was running it, where DeepMine, the Gemini app gets built within DeepMine, right? So as an example, Cori had moved here to the Bay Area almost, you know, maybe 18 months ago. There's been close integration, makes sense for compute, for DeepMind to impact the rest of the Google.

9. 19:37

   So there's been deep collaboration, which has already been underway a lot. So I don't think any of this in the continuum wasn't maybe externally people noticed that as a moment. But for us, it's been a deep coupling, which has been underway for a long time.