Not through conscience.

Jeff and Sanjay both leaving!

Oh wow demis and Jeff, that Ethics engineer who left GDM, and reached to both and posted on lesswrong a couple weeks [1] ago did make a difference?

1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...

I wonder if Jeff Dean facts [1] (I hope people remember the reference) will carry over to the new startup.

[1] https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts

End of an era for Alphabet.

Just remember to make sure you turn in your devices.

As LLM coding agents plateau— at least for the average engineer without tens of thousands of dollars or swarms of agents to run —I’d say that, from here on it’s going to be about ASICs, specialized LoRA/or-equivalent models, or a Ruby on Rails for LLM context engineering and orchestration, which LangChain and others seems well position, including Google as they own the entire stack. LLM free lunch has been over for a while, perhaps since the ReAct loop, and has been official since Ilya mentioned it at NeurIPS.

I feel the most exciting development these days is self-evolving agents. Especially if you have a way to verify their outputs with a formal system, or with a system developed since the 60s by armies of PhDs.

DeepMinds Gnome is a good example, where they use DFT to verify outputs. Approximating NP-problems is always fun for those who dare.

I am also building in this space. Its a mix between HPC, AI, and hard science. Pretty fun compared to waking everyday to LLM news that seem more like marketing stunts.

To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup. They truly deserve it, but I don't expect a huge success as a business.

That said, I hope they write cool papers with various peers across the industry without worrying too much about the competing dynamics. That'd be a blessing for humanity, and good for their spirit.

Related:

The next chapter of our AI momentum

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755

I wonder if this has anything to do with it

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...

Did the ycombinator podcast which included giving advice to startup founders just a few days ago:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Vy-jeff-dean-the-1-rule-...

Imagine being a VC and getting to this slide on their pitch deck, "involved in creating the following":

https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2085036253263921218

I've seen tiny tiny hints from the outside that Jeff Dean was dealing with too much internal BS. Two examples that come to mind: Having to deal with Timnit Gebru fiasco, and even chips in the TPU series getting marketing names (Trillium and Ironwood) before switching back to more standard numbering.

Well, damn. Jeff, Sanjay and Demis leaving all at once, it's hard not to read that as someone fucked up pretty bad.

They're structuring the new company as public benefit corporation.