The paper that left the building

Google published the architecture every frontier model is built on. As of this week it employs none of the eight people who wrote it.

Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years, with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, to start Discovery Loop. Demis Hassabis takes the DeepMind chairmanship and Alphabet chief scientist role. Alphabet fell about 4 percent.

Count the authors

With Noam Shazeer's move to OpenAI in June, all eight authors of the 2017 Transformer paper have now left Google. Not most. All of them.

That is not a talent-retention statistic, it is a statement about where the work moved. The company that invented the architecture, published it openly, and then watched the entire industry build on it, no longer employs a single person who was in the room.

What Dean specifically means

MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow, Google Brain. Dean built infrastructure the rest of the field inherited, and losing him alongside Ghemawat — the collaborator he built most of it with — is a different order of event from an executive departure.

Google investing in Discovery Loop is the pragmatic response, and it is also an admission. You take a stake in the thing you could not keep.

The shape underneath

A public benefit corporation aimed at AI for science and engineering is a deliberate signal about what these founders think the frontier labs stopped doing. They are not leaving to build a better chatbot.

And the traffic runs both directions. OpenAI acquiring a presentation startup and putting the team straight into ChatGPT is the other model of talent movement: buy the team, absorb the product, disclose it months later.

One company is losing the people who invented the field to a science venture. The other is buying teams that make slides. Both are rational. Only one of them is about research.

CNBC — Google chief scientist Jeff Dean leaving company after 27 years → · TechCrunch — Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup → · CNBC — Alphabet is slumping on the departure of another AI exec →