Google Grapples With Exit of AI Pioneer and ‘Most Google Person’
· Financial Post
(Bloomberg) — Days after Google unveiled its first Gemini chatbot in 2023 to compete with ChatGPT, Jeff Dean went to an AI conference where he was promptly swarmed by attendees. Suddenly, the Google executive looked at his watch and realized he was due to give a talk minutes later, spurring a rush to take selfies with the influential tech leader before he left.Now, it’s the employees at Google who are bracing for the AI pioneer’s exit. Dean, who started at the company more than two decades ago, said Wednesday that he is leaving Google alongside colleagues Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals to build a startup called Discovery Loop. The announcement was part of a broader executive shuffle that saw Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis shift into a chairman role at the AI lab.Dean’s move represents one of the most significant departures from Google’s AI organization in years and comes at a moment of uncertainty about its ability to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Current and former employees said morale inside Google dipped following the company’s AI leadership shakeup and predicted the loss of Dean would make it more difficult to recruit top AI talent.Dean, who joined Google as employee number 30 in 1999, has played a key role in nearly all of the company’s major products, from search to ads to chips, culminating in his work guiding artificial intelligence advances as the company’s chief scientist.“He created modern deep learning in many ways,” said Dogus Cubuk, who spent years working with Dean at Google and counts him as an investor in his startup, Periodic Labs.As a co-founder of Google Brain in 2011, Dean was a face of the company’s AI efforts for 15 years. In 2016, he and two dozen co-authors, including Ghemawat, pioneered TensorFlow, which is open-source software that lets people more easily build AI systems. He and Ghemawat also developed MapReduce to dramatically improve the ability to process huge datasets. Read More
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