Yes, you're right, the 27-year-old CEO of Google, Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Google Research, Jeff Dean, are leaving!
Earlier this morning, Jeff Dean announced his resignation, saying "Tomorrow will be my last day at Google".
In his 27 years at Google, he witnessed the company grow from a team of just 25 people to a tech giant with more than 190,000 employees.
It's a great honor to be able to work with you and create some of the most widely used and influential products that have ever existed.
When I was a kid, I dreamed that one day I would be involved in the development of software that many people use. Today, Google has 13 products with over 1 billion users, and it's amazing.
Our work has had a profound impact on the world. I am very fortunate to work with and be friends with many colleagues that I truly admire, respect and appreciate.
To this day, I still feel heartfelt joy whenever I see people around the world using our products - searching for information, processing emails, translating documents, watching videos, learning new things, navigating and understanding the real world, browsing web pages, using mobile phones, using our infrastructure for large-scale computing, driving autonomous cars, or completing complex tasks with AI systems.
I hope that you too will share in the joy we have shared.
Thanks to every Google employee who has worked with me over the years!
Meanwhile, Jeff Dean reveals his next plan to start a new startup project with old friends, old partners Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and how to use the right automated locks to help AI discover new things.
Discovery Loop was officially founded as a new public benefit company with a mission to drive machine learning, science and engineering process automation to accelerate new discoveries and technological advances.
Jeff Dean said they were looking forward to trying something new in a smaller environment. Google and Alphabet's parent company CEO Pichai fully understood his decision and supported us with outside investors.
"From Google's early search infrastructure to the neural network technology that led to the birth of the modern AI era, Jeff and Sanjay have been involved in and driven many important technological transformations in the company's history. For me personally, working alongside Jeff and Sanjay is a privilege. I wish them all the best in the future. Google will continue to work with them. We will support the company as a founding investor and cloud service partner and jointly research a new framework for machine learning systems, as well as advances in related infrastructure technologies".
High-level adjustments to Google AI
Jeff Dean's departure quickly sparked a series of chain reactions.
Hassabis, the CEO and founder of Google DeepMind, will become the chairman and chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Alphabet.
He said he has spent his entire life working to achieve AGI. The new position will allow him to devote more energy to long-term strategy and scientific breakthroughs, including further involvement with Isomorphic and promoting disease treatment research.
Meanwhile, Koray Kavukcuoglu will be promoted to Senior Vice President, leading Google DeepMind, and working with Josh Woodward and the management team to advance the next chapter. Hassabis is looking forward to and confident in the upcoming new chapter of Google DeepMind.
Google and its parent company Alphabet CEO Pichai and Hassabis each issued a letter to all employees:
The letter to Pichai's full-time staff is as follows:
We have made remarkable strides in building a complete AI technology suite. We have great talent, world-class computing capabilities, and AI products that reach more users than any other company. As we can see from our latest earnings, business lines like search, YouTube, and cloud business are maintaining strong momentum. Gemini models are widely popular with developers and enterprise customers, with over 950 million monthly active users of Gemini applications. At the same time, our AI research continues to make breakthroughs to define industry directions, such as the new developments in Gemini Robotics released last week.
Next, we must further accelerate the pace of this work and continue to focus on the AI frontline. At the same time, the importance of shaping the future of AGI and scientific research has never been more prominent than it is today. Today, Demis, Koray and I will announce a series of tweaks by the Google DeepMind team to advance both goals at the same time.
Demis Hassabis will focus on AGI and scientific strategy
Demis has described that we are standing "at the foot of the mountain that leads to the odd point". He has also invested a lot of energy in external communication for some time. Demis and I started discussions early, hoping to design a new role for him so that he can fully engage in shaping the future of AGI. This work is crucial for Alphabet and humanity as a whole, and I don't think anyone better suited for this role than Demis.
In the future, Demis will serve as Google DeepMind's president and chief scientist at Alphabet while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. He will remain in close contact with Koray, Josh and the Google DeepMind teams and continue to advise on models and research.
Koray will take over as Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind is currently maintaining a strong momentum. The demand for Gemini Flash is booming, the cybersecurity model has been up and running, and the Gemma series model has been downloaded over 900 million times. We will continue to be at the forefront of technology while focusing on areas that still need to be improved.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind's current chief technology officer and chief AI architect, will be promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to me. He will be responsible for Gemini model R&D, cutting-edge AI research, and the Gemini app and developer team.
Koray joined the company from the early days of DeepMind. Over the past 13 years, he has built the company's deep learning team and driven important technological breakthroughs such as WaveNet, DQN. I look forward to seeing him lead Google DeepMind to a new chapter.
The following is a letter from Hassabis to its members:
We are at a crucial juncture in human history.
I have spent my entire life working to achieve AGI. Now, like many others, I feel that AGI is just around the corner. Every next step is crucial. We must make the right choices together to ensure that this process benefits humanity and usher in a new era of discovery and wonder.
In that context, I think it's time to hand over the day-to-day running of Google DeepMind. I'll have more time and space to focus on bigger issues and do my best to influence the future ahead.
I will serve as Google DeepMind's President and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. At the same time, I am pleased to announce that Koray will be promoted to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind to lead Google DeepMind and continue to serve as Google's Chief AI Architect.
Koray and I have worked together for over 13 years, from the early days of DeepMind to the present day. He is one of the world's leading AI experts and has been committed to advancing the mission of Google DeepMind from day one.
I am confident that Koray, Josh and the Google DeepMind management team will continue to lead Google in advancing the latest AI technology. The Gemini model has long been promoted jointly by Koray and team leaders and will continue to be responsible for them in the future. The new generation of models, including the Gemini 4, are making exciting progress and I look forward to it.
In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategy and global affairs related to AGI and provide advice to the heads of the Koray, Josh and Google DeepMind teams at the new Platform 37 office in London.
With this adjustment, I will also put more energy into working with Isomorphic. At the moment, we are making very rapid and encouraging progress, and I hope to further accelerate the progress of this mission.
As I've said many times, I've always believed that the most important application of AI should be to improve human health. Now is the time for AI to prove its undeniable value to the world.
We've built a unique culture at Google DeepMind that supports the team's continued progress. I want to thank each and every member. It's your talent, dedication and efforts that have made Google DeepMind what it is today.
We should all be very proud of what we have achieved so far.
Google DeepMind has become Google's core AI engine. Gemini is helping users with a growing range of products and scenarios, including AI Mode and AI Overviews; Gemini's monthly active users have rapidly surpassed 950 million; and our basic research and scientific research continues to lead the world.
I'm looking forward to the next chapter, which is even more exciting.
From a business standpoint, we're in an extremely favorable position. We're the only company with a full suite of AI technologies, and we have world-class infrastructure, cloud services, cutting edge models, and AI native applications at every level.
We have everything we need already, and I am confident we will do it.
What are Jeff Dean's accomplishments on Google?
In 1999, Jeff Dean joined Google and has been there ever since.
During this time, he enjoyed working with people and was involved in many different types of projects. Here are some of the projects and memories that Jeff Dean cherishes most:
In just a few years, the size of the index has expanded 100 times, the number of queries processed per second has increased 1,000 times, and the index updates have increased 10,000 times.
He created Google's first advertising system and later created and launched Google Content Ads.
He helped launch Google News and Google Translate.
He has worked with a group of excellent colleagues to develop infrastructure like MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, DistBelief, TensorFlow and Pathways.
Starting a TPU project and working with talented colleagues on other exciting hardware projects.
He has worked with many researchers on unsupervised learning, model distillation, hybrid expert model architecture, word2vec, neural architecture search, reinforcement learning for ASIC design, and medical AI, and has been involved in the development of generations of multilingual models.
I have had the privilege of being in charge of Google Brain and Google Research and witnessing the great work that these two teams have done over the years.
He started the Gemini project with Oriol Vinyals as head of technology and worked with an excellent team to develop multi-generation Gemini and Gemma models.
I've exchanged 18 offices and visited 29 Google offices on five continents. You know, with a Google business card, you can make yourself a cup of cabernet in over 100 cities around the world.
Most importantly, I've always been fortunate to work with such an excellent and talented group of colleagues, and I've always been inspired by them.
The link is as follows: