Google effectively opened its skull and began rearranging the cortex. Jeff Dean, one of the architects of the company's technical nervous system, is leaving after 27 years. Together with longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, he is launching Discovery Loop, a public-benefit company designed to automate machine learning, science, and engineering. Yet this is not a conventional Silicon Valley defection. Google will remain a founding investor and cloud partner. It feels less like a neuron abandoning the brain and more like a new lobe being detached, given its own budget, and connected back through an API. The second move was even more revealing. Demis Hassabis is handing Google DeepMind's daily operations to Koray Kavukcuoglu and becoming chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Hassabis will focus more heavily on AGI, scientific discovery, global strategy, and Isomorphic Labs. The chess prodigy is moving away from managing every piece and toward deciding which game Google...
learn more
