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.
A public benefit corp shouldn’t be a start up. The primary goal of a start up is to grow as quickly as possible which is rarely benefits the public.
Very silly to call every non start up a lifestyle business. It’s just a business. Start up are the weird thing that almost always an obscene waste of time and money, but sometime creates google.
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.
LLM coding isn't even close to plateauing. Right now, the major players are in a consolidation step, focusing more on economic efficiency but still not at the point where we're ready to start burning models to hardware and freezing the line.
They are straddling the line between pushing it forward, and justifying the business case. It's hard to do both at the same time.
LLMs are hungry for tokens. Every day I see more startups claiming token usage at 50-100k per month. You can always brute-force your way in - just see HuggingFace's recent attacks.
If throwing more money at inference while accumulating compounding technical debt is the new norm, then we are not solving the problem, and the solution space is already covered.
Perhaps there are marginal gains at the expense of quadrillion-params LLM models with 10x the cost and energy. We are simply making inefficiency more expensive, camouflaged by VC money and great marketing.
If that is not plateauing, then I guess I will have to reconsider what plateauing means.
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.
I have no doubt that internal Google friction is one of the reasons they are moving. But the Gebru incident was almost seven years ago now. It is very unlikely to be a proximate cause.
I doubt numbering vs names on TPU releases even crosses Jeff's radar. It's not the kind of thing he cares about.
hmm not really, and it probably isnt the origin, but im glad to see him vindicated by having both C-level google leadership people who targeted to try and either stop google from doing the pentagon deal, both stepping down the same day.
At least it makes me feel like he reaching out might have made a difference on remembering this people killer robots are bad, and being part of it might not be on the best of their interests to go down on history for
Jeff Dean, Sanjay, et al have achieved so much. I'm very happy for them. Truly deserving.
Sometimes I couldn't resist wondering if I'll ever do work that has a tenth of the impact of theirs.
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.
A public benefit corp shouldn’t be a start up. The primary goal of a start up is to grow as quickly as possible which is rarely benefits the public.
Very silly to call every non start up a lifestyle business. It’s just a business. Start up are the weird thing that almost always an obscene waste of time and money, but sometime creates google.
> To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup
They're also incredibly productive and can build/deliver really good stuff, so who knows :)
End of an era for Alphabet.
I give it a 51% chance of Discovery Loop being acquired by Google
They are already partially funded by Google.
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
«Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi.»
I had not read this before, but told many students the same about my PIN code and I a quiz about the last digits. Love it.
0000 in base pi. Oh Jeff.
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.
Sounds like you get your news from 2024 when people thought things were plateauing after GPT4?
LLM coding isn't even close to plateauing. Right now, the major players are in a consolidation step, focusing more on economic efficiency but still not at the point where we're ready to start burning models to hardware and freezing the line.
They are straddling the line between pushing it forward, and justifying the business case. It's hard to do both at the same time.
LLMs are hungry for tokens. Every day I see more startups claiming token usage at 50-100k per month. You can always brute-force your way in - just see HuggingFace's recent attacks.
If throwing more money at inference while accumulating compounding technical debt is the new norm, then we are not solving the problem, and the solution space is already covered.
Perhaps there are marginal gains at the expense of quadrillion-params LLM models with 10x the cost and energy. We are simply making inefficiency more expensive, camouflaged by VC money and great marketing.
If that is not plateauing, then I guess I will have to reconsider what plateauing means.
we definitely haven't hit plateau yet. I think a lot of people latch on to anti-LLM narratives without really thinking things through.
I wonder if this has anything to do with it
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
Doubtful. His destination is both funded by Google and has a compute deal with Google.
https://archive.ph/Pogl7
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-...
As always, a very good presentation.
Just remember to make sure you turn in your devices.
Same day Google is rolling out layoffs.
Alphabet has almost 200k employees, it would be surprising if they weren't constantly laying off a ton of people (and hiring them).
They're structuring the new company as public benefit corporation.
Does this mean anything besides for corporate virtue signaling?
Related:
Discovery Loop
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184960
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.
I have no doubt that internal Google friction is one of the reasons they are moving. But the Gebru incident was almost seven years ago now. It is very unlikely to be a proximate cause.
I doubt numbering vs names on TPU releases even crosses Jeff's radar. It's not the kind of thing he cares about.
Related:
The next chapter of our AI momentum
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755
Well, damn. Jeff, Sanjay and Demis leaving all at once, it's hard not to read that as someone fucked up pretty bad.
Hassabis isn't leaving
Ah, you're right. Thanks for the correction. I read that other post too fast.
Jeff and Sanjay both leaving!
Not through conscience.
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...
...you think they've only been planning this for a couple weeks?
hmm not really, and it probably isnt the origin, but im glad to see him vindicated by having both C-level google leadership people who targeted to try and either stop google from doing the pentagon deal, both stepping down the same day.
At least it makes me feel like he reaching out might have made a difference on remembering this people killer robots are bad, and being part of it might not be on the best of their interests to go down on history for
Alex Turner discusses a bit here at this timestamp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGlJQHVeKIA&t=14m27s
what was the post?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...