Google DeepMind Reorgs, Rainforest Discoveries, Monkey Prices Surge | Harley Finkelstein, John J. Giamatteo, Jeremy Allaire, Mackenzie Burnett

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**John Coogan** (0:02)
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What just happened at Google DeepMind? Crazy, crazy morning shakeup, a reorg, stepping down, stepping up, stepping left, stepping right. There's a lot of different terms. We're going to break it down. We'll explain the organization before, now what it looks like going forward, what this means, where this goes. So this morning, Demis Hasabas, the legendary AI researcher, the founder of DeepMind.

**Jordi Hays** (0:43)
A true scientist.

**John Coogan** (0:44)
A true scientist.
The subject of Sebastian Malabai's book, The Infinity Machine, The Infinite Machine, he announced that he's stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. He's also stepping up into the role of Google DeepMind chairman, and he will also be Alphabet's chief scientist. So is it a promotion? Is it a demotion? Is he quitting? Is he getting fired? Who knows? But the most important thing is that he's still there at Alphabet. He has a different role, and that's what's important. What is the nature of this new role?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that Google DeepMind scientist Jeff Dean will be leaving the company after a 27-year run to start, along with Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Giamatteo, a public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. If you're not familiar with Jeff Dean, he is the Chuck Norris of computer engineering and software engineering. There's a whole list of jokes around Jeff Dean jokes.

**Jordi Hays** (1:49)
Why don't you read some of them, John?

**John Coogan** (1:50)
What are my favorite Jeff Dean jokes? There's a whole bunch. Any opportunity to repost the Jeff Dean Informatica link. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Jeff Dean's keyboard, it only has two keys, a one and a zero because he programs in binary.
It's that type of thing.
Unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O1 over an algorithm. So he can bend time. There's all these programmer jokes, I don't know. They're a lot of fun. He knows the last digit of pi, that type of thing. But he's been a legend. These were on Quora maybe 15 years ago, maybe more people were so excited about him. And for good reason, he invented tons of things.

**Jordi Hays** (2:35)
Jeff Dean doesn't call APIs, APIs call him.

**John Coogan** (2:38)
Exactly, that type of thing. Very fun. So the lore around Jeff Dean has been substantial throughout his entire career.
He has been, you know, very key to so many different Google projects, Integral and MapReduce, and actually being able to scale Google systems.

**Mackenzie Burnett** (2:57)
Does this make any sense?

**Jordi Hays** (2:58)
Chuck Norris counted to infinity twice. Jeff Dean did it in parallel.

**John Coogan** (3:03)
Ah, okay. Yeah, that's kind of funny. It's a programmer joke, but...
But yeah, it's just funny that he was able to have this level of aura at Google as like a non-founder, just a great scientist, and it was so long ago, before there were so much attention on talent below the founding team and below the investing team or whatever.

**Jordi Hays** (3:31)
Truly a living legend. Yeah, completely.
Google Jersey will be going in the rafters. Yes, for sure. He's not done.

**John Coogan** (3:38)
He's not done and he's starting a new company, which is very exciting because there's a lot of opportunity in machine learning, science and engineering, obviously.
So Google DeepMind CTO and Google's Chief AI Architect, Corey Cavullo, I can't pronounce it, I'm sorry, is being promoted to SVP and will lead DeepMind, so Corey is now running DeepMind. But interestingly, there's no new CEO of DeepMind, which always seemed to be an odd decision because DeepMind was not its own reporting unit. Like when quarterly earnings happen, you get YouTube numbers, you get Google Cloud numbers. And so having a CEO of those divisions made a lot of sense of those organizations. But DeepMind was always a unit that sort of cut across everything, because the work that DeepMind does on Gemini and the models made a lot of sense to vend into YouTube. And now there's a little Gemini button when you're on YouTube and you can just go to a one hour long podcast and say, when do they talk about this? And it will just answer you. And so that was like a feature that was vended into that. Obviously goes into core Google search. Gemini models help with ads. They help with the actual Gemini products. They get vended everywhere. There's a Gemini button in Chrome. There's also a Gemini button in Google Docs. There's also a Gemini button in Gmail. And so it was never like its own, even though it was its own unit, the value that it created at Google was very cross-organizational as opposed to the YouTube team has a CEO and they have revenues and they have ads and they have a product. And yes, it's integrated into the other things, but it very much is a standalone organization, reports its own financials and has a CEO. So no CEO for DeepMind, at least in the short term. We'll see where it goes. On X, Demis says the move will quote, allow him to focus on long term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs. He's done a lot of that already, including leaning into his work at Isomorphic to help cure disease. He fleshed this out more on Google's blog.