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Comment by manvel_hn | Hacker News Reader

It's quite interesting that those events are happening at the same moment. I wonder whether they are related

I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.

Isn't it "just" a matter of Jeff Dean (& co) leaving, Hassabis replacing Dean, and Kavukcuoglu replacing Hassabis ?

A massive shake up for sure, but why do you see it as separate events merely timed to coincide ?

So there are two events here:

Event 1 - Jeff & co leaving.

Event 2 - Demis stepping down. DeepMind doesn't need a "chair" and "Alphabet's chief scientist" is a bullshit title that Jeff invented for himself when he moved from Google Research to GDM, to make it look like we wasn't abandoning the former for the latter.

The third change is basically ratifying the status quo, since Koray has been de factor running GDM for a while now (and directly reporting to Sundar in addition to reporting to Demis, who in turn also reported to Sundar - quite some triangle there).

One detail I missed is that Koray's new title is "SVP of Google DeepMind"[1], i.e. identical to his old title.

So, basically, the third change is even more of a no-op than I thought.

It seems pretty clear that GDM will no longer have a CEO.

[1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...

Yes. In public relations you never want to trickle out bad/concerning the news, you want to "rip off the band-aid and preferably follow it up with some positive/distracting news like 3.5 Pro model release or price drops.

Some do-nothing EVP probably just got control over the Gemini org

Gemini had come under Hassabis, being co-led by Shazeer and Vinyals, who are now both gone. Gemini will now come under Koray Kavukcuoglu, reporting direct to Pichai as SVP of DeepMind.

Big shake up for Gemini it seems.

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