Demis Is Out as DeepMind CEO, Revolut Founder Yacht Drama, AI’s Great Reverse Bank Run | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:What just happened at Google DeepMind? Crazy, crazy morning. Shake up, a reorg, stepping down, stepping up, stepping left, stepping right. There's a lot of different terms. We'll break it down. We'll explain the organization before, now what it looks like going forward, what this means, where this goes. So this morning, Demis Hassabis, the legendary AI researcher, the founder of DeepMind. A true scientist. A true scientist. The subject of Sebastian Maliby's book, The Infinity Machine, The Infinite Machine, he announced that he's stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. He's also stepping up into the role of Google DeepMind chairman, and he will also be Alphabet's chief scientist.

0:42John Coogan:Is it a promotion? Is it a demotion? Is he quitting? Is he getting fired? Who knows? But the most important thing is that he's still there at Alphabet. He has a different role, and that's what's important. What is the nature of this new role? Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean will be leaving the company after a 27-year run to start, along with Google senior fellow Sanjay Gemwat, a public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. And if you're not familiar with Jeff Dean, he is the Chuck Norris of computer engineering and software engineering.

1:20John Coogan:There's a whole list of jokes around Jeff Dean jokes. Why don't you read some of them, John? What are my favorite Jeff Dean jokes? There's a whole bunch. Any opportunity to repost the Jeff Dean Informatica link. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Jeff Dean's keyboard, it only has two keys, a one and a zero. because he programs in binary. It's that type of thing. Unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O1 over N algorithm. So he can bend time. There's all these programmer jokes. I don't know. They're a lot of fun. He knows the last digit of pi, that type of thing.

2:01John Coogan:But he's been a legend. These were on Quora maybe 15 years ago, maybe more. People were so excited about him. And for good reason. He invented tons of things. Jeff Dean doesn't call APIs. APIs call him. Exactly, that type of thing. The lore around Jeff Dean has been substantial throughout his entire career. He has been very key to so many different Google projects, Integral and MapReduce, and actually being able to scale Google systems. Does this make any sense? Chuck Norris counted to infinity twice. Jeff Dean did it in parallel. Ah, okay. Yeah, that's kind of funny. It's a programmer joke, but, uh, I don't know.

2:42John Coogan:But yeah, it's just funny that he was able to like have this level of aura at Google, uh, as like a non-founder, just a great scientist. And it was so long ago before there were, before there was so much attention on like talent below the founding team and below the investing team or whatever, you know, truly a living legend. Yeah. Jersey will be going, Google Jersey will be going in the rafters. Yes, for sure. But he's not done. He's not done, and he's starting a new company, which is very exciting because there's a lot of opportunity in machine learning, science, and engineering, obviously. So Google DeepMind's CTO and Google's chief AI architect, Corey Kavu-Kaluchulu, I can't pronounce that, I'm sorry, is being promoted to SVP and will lead DeepMind.

3:28John Coogan:So Corey is now running DeepMind. But interestingly, there's no new CEO of DeepMind, which always seemed to be an odd decision because DeepMind was not its own reporting unit. Like when quarterly earnings happen, you get YouTube numbers, you get Google Cloud numbers. And so having a CEO of those divisions made a lot of sense of those organizations. But DeepMind was always a unit that sort of cut across everything because the work that DeepMind does on Gemini and the models made a lot of sense to vend into YouTube. And now there's a little Gemini button when you're on YouTube and you can just go to a one hour long podcast and say, when do they talk about this?

4:12John Coogan:And it'll just answer you. And so that was like a feature that was vended into that. It obviously goes into core Google search. Gemini models help with ads. They help with the actual Gemini products. Like they get vended everywhere. There's a Gemini button in Chrome. There's also a Gemini button in Google Docs. There's also a Gemini button in Gmail. And so it was never like its own, even though it was its own unit, like the value that it created at Google was very cross organizational as opposed to, you know, the YouTube team has a CEO and they have revenues and they have ads and they have a product.

4:44John Coogan:And yes, it's integrated into the other things, but it very much is a standalone organization, reports its own financials and has a CEO. So no CEO for DeepMind, at least in the short term. We'll see where it goes. On X, Demis says the move will, quote, allow him to focus on long-term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs. He's done a lot of that already, including leaning into his work at Isomorphic to help cure disease. He fleshed this out more on Google's blog. He said, I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.

5:25John Coogan:In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters and to advise Corey, Josh, and the GDM leads from our awesome new London Platform 37 offices. As part of this transition, I will also be leaning into my role at Isomorphic, where we are making extremely rapid and promising progress to accelerate our mission there even faster. As you have heard me say many times, I've always believed the number one application of AI should be to improve human health. That is a great message. Very different from the SpaceX S1. The number one application of AI is enterprise software.

6:04Harness the power of the entire galaxy.

6:05John Coogan:I mean, there's that, but also just in the actual application, it's like enterprise workflows, which is where the value is now, at least. Some type of shakeup has been expected for a long time. The DeepMind organization has made some real contributions to the space, but has been lagging. It's been a point of embarrassment for, I would say, for Google for, I would say, a year plus. Plus, they've always felt behind, even though they created so much of the fundamental research that has gone into this entire chapter of the, you know. Certainly not behind on video. The video stuff's really good. Yeah, sure.

6:48John Coogan:But then you get kind of tied up because the Chinese models are like, actually, we will do Mickey Mouse. Yeah, but here's the thing. At no point has Google been breaking out their true AI revenue in a way that gets shareholders excited. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and there's just been so many question marks. There was a moment, I mean, over a year ago, it felt like Google had some real momentum, but that momentum was very much lost. And so there's this question of, you know, when Gnome left, which was about a month ago, that felt that was like more shocking in some ways than even this. This feels like expected.

7:28And then to leave what what feels like a hole in the organization is pretty, pretty wild. Stock's down. It was down five percent around the open. It's it's recovered a little bit, just down three and a half percent. But I mean, the big thing is like they just started like Google as a company, I don't think was able to be at least sufficiently AI pilled. Right. They started selling compute. A lot of researchers, I'm sure, were frustrated with that. And that could have could have led to some of the historical.

8:01John Coogan:Tyler over there thinks NVIDIA shouldn't sell the chips if they're really AGI pilled. the much more extreme version of Google should keep the TPUs for themselves is NVIDIA should keep the GPUs for themselves. And yeah, I mean, that was something that was discussed as, okay, if you believe you're in the foothills of the singularity, you will want to scale your compute. If you're seeing traction in the products that you're making, you want to be GPU rich. You don't want to be selling TPUs to other companies. And so that's got to be, there's got to be some tension, but Google's a big organization.

8:37John Coogan:There's multiple organizations within Google and they all have different KPIs. So one team might say, yeah, my mandate is to sell as many of these as possible externally. Other people might say, my job is to keep as many of these internally. And there's a lot of debates there. So we'll see. Obviously, Google has made a massive bet on Anthropik and is becoming their largest financial backer, especially through some new reporting on some of the lease guarantees that they're doing. But anyway, still so surprising. Google, obviously one of the greatest companies of all time, has every possible advantage in this race and yet has just consistently struggled.

9:21Susan Zhang, who is currently on leave from DeepMind, posted a little, somewhat of a fable. Backdrop. Kings all asleep slash on vacation while minions slave away. August 2024. First big fail. Fast forward January 2025. Only competent VP bails after one terrorist lead demanding an even bigger slice of pie breaks the camel's back. Summer 2025. A year ago, second big fail. And king of terrorists climbs the ranks above the slumbering exec.

9:55John Coogan:This is a crazy sub-tweet. Summer of 2026, slumbering execs and terrorists who only show up for successful announcements move on, leaving just the king of terrorists behind. Lessons. If you're high enough up there, you can pretty much be a terrorist and hold orgs hostage while continuing to ask for more and more and more until there's absolutely no more aura or gold left to plunder and then just move on to greener pastures to do it all over again. and we'll leave it up to you to try to figure out who's who in this story. It doesn't strike me that Susan will be headed back to the company after this post.

10:37John Coogan:This is a crazy, crazy post. She says, I've been on leave since January, got pretty burned out by certain people who just say yes to everything to avoid ever making a hard call and leave it all to the hungry minions to backstab each other until success finds a cursed hole to crawl out of. And to be fair, I was looking at Tyler's alt account, and he talks about us like this all the time. He's always talking. He refers to you as the slumbering exec and me as the terrorist. The terrorist. I mean, I believe in free speech. I defend your right to say these things, Tyler. I am offended, but, you know.

11:08John Coogan:Nopty, nopty. No, it's a wild, wild thing. One of the crazier sub-tweets from a big tech. Yeah, but I don't know. I was never sure that she worked there. It felt like it was maybe like an alt account and it was just like an anon, but it does seem like, I mean, she's saying right here, I've been on leave from this organization, so I don't know. And somebody calls her the Homer of our times. Another interesting wrinkle here is if you look at what Demis was talking about writing about just a few weeks ago, it wasn't as much focused on the isometric scientific advancements. I know he's super deep in that, and that's what he said he's been focusing on.

11:53John Coogan:And I love that message. He says it's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value in the world. And what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer? I 100 % agree. 100 % agree that if you get a new cure for cancer, you save someone's life, and they can go and say, yes, I took the new cancer cure and I was cured. AI is doing its job, a lot of people will be very happy about that. Perfect. But that's not what Demis was writing about a couple weeks ago. The last substantial piece that Demis put out was called the Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of New Age, in which he argues for a frontier AI standards body that evaluates frontier models before they're released for risks associated with superintelligence.

12:42John Coogan:It's at the very least not crazy to assume that Demis' new role at Alphabet that is maybe related to what he's advocating for in this essay. There's been a lot of back and forth in Washington about the interpretation of that essay. And a lot of AI researchers have stepped up and said, like, yeah, we basically agree with this. This framework seems pretty good. It includes open source models in there. Yeah, to me, Demis could be an amazing candidate as somebody to lead a new regulatory body. Lead America as the president. You think he's running? Not quite. I think we've got a good researcher in there at this point.

13:16John Coogan:It'd be great. Yeah. No, so big question now. So Jeff Dean is out. Noam Shazir is out. Demis is out. Who is going to fill that void from a leadership standpoint? How are they going to be able to recruit the best researchers in the world? That's a big question mark. I wouldn't be surprised to see Google just shift into more of an NVIDIA style role as like a capital partner to a number of other labs. as they continue to fall? It's maybe more of like an Amazon and Microsoft role where you have a great business. You're also great at building infrastructure. You also have a semiconductor team and a chip team.

13:58John Coogan:And you can play up and down the stack, but maybe you're not as focused on this, like full stack, straight shot thing. And you're partnering with other labs on different pieces of the puzzle. It'll be interesting to see where everything goes. Tano Bruss says, Demis is ousted as DeepMind CEO and Jeff Dean and Sanjay are leaving Google to start a Neolab. They're all being very careful to frame these as positive shifts, but there's no way, in heck, Demis would have accepted this willingly, and there's no way Sundar happily accepted Jeff doing this as a totally independent new public benefit corporation rather than a bet under Alphabet.

14:31Tough to see an interpretation other than Jeff losing confidence and working on AGI under Google. We need a Sebastian Maliby sequel.

14:38John Coogan:We need a sequel. Alphabet overall. I would love for him to write a sequel to just – and even zoom out and look at the AGI wars generally like he did in the power law about the early venture capital firms and how they all formed and battled each other. That would be great. Anyway. Rohan Anil over at Core Automation says, pour one out for the big G. It's so over. we did have a funny uh funny moment with uh google ai overviews uh yes uh a couple days ago where uh it said that one of our friends yeah was married to another of our friends wife yes and it was quite confident in that it was and i have no idea how how it even thought of that yeah i I think it was because they did a podcast together or something like that.

15:33John Coogan:Like they were linked in a blog post together or something. Doing a podcast together. She wrote about him or something or wrote a profile and it just like put the names together. Very odd. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. You have to wonder what it takes to get AI overviews into like a reasoning mode that can actually do the fact checking. So the hallucinations die down because. Well, yeah. And they have to figure out a way to make that process so inexpensive because they're serving it. Yeah, billions. Nathan Lambert says major restructuring at Gemini will be studied forever as the incumbent with all the advantages not being able to get going.

16:09John Coogan:They got going. This is not correct. They completely got going. They got going, but they certainly didn't build real momentum. And then he says, P.S. OpenAI accomplished their original goal. The least bias is P.S. of the century. But yeah, the backstory is that a lot of the initial energy around OpenAI was a concern that Google would control AGI and a fear from the various early participants around that scenario. Yeah, interesting. And almost even more positive news, the moment you've all been waiting for, CarPlay is coming to pontoon boats. Let's go. Finally. Finally, finally, finally. Have you ever been on a pontoon boat?

16:59Yes.

17:00John Coogan:Explain. What context were you on a pontoon boat? What does a pontoon boat even look like? This is a terrible photo. It's for cruising. It's for cruising. Team, pull up a pontoon boat. It's not like a monohull, but it's not a catamaran? It's something between like a cigarette boat and a houseboat. Okay. That's a really wide gap. Well, it's right in the middle. Okay. Mastercraft Boat Holdings today said it's adding CarPlay to its upcoming Crest and Belize pontoons. The company is working with Savvy Navy to bring CarPlay and on-water navigation to boaters. And Mastercraft Boat Holdings, Inc., of course, a public company experiencing a god candle.

17:41Wait, really? Up 0.72%. Up 18 cents today. Okay, this is cool.

17:48John Coogan:This is very cool. See? Yeah, this is a double-decker. Double-decker. See, out in California, we don't know anything about these pontoon boats because these don't work at the beach, right? Correct. But I was sort of correct. Somewhere in between a houseboat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Aren't you from the land of a thousand lakes, right? Michigan, isn't that the land of a thousand lakes? No, me. Minnesota. Oh, you're from a... Okay. Are you a pontoon boat guy? Pontoon boats are huge in Minnesota. Okay. Yeah. How many... They're for lakes. They're for lakes, basically. How many hours have you spent on pontoon boats in your life?

18:20John Coogan:10 ,000. 10 ,000 hours? I'm an expert. The man put in life's work on the pontoon boat, apparently.

18:31You're in the wrong job, buddy.

18:33John Coogan:I think you've got to become a pontoon boat captain at this point. It is crazy to think in another life, Ben, could have been the top pontoon boat salesman in the entire world. Moving over to what is the story of the day in technology. Yes. Startup billionaire sued over super yacht broker fee. Everyone's talking about this. This is potentially bigger than what's going on at Google today. In London, the billionaire founder of one of the world's most valuable startups recently bought a super yacht valued at an estimated$400 million.

19:10Yeah. Continue.

19:13John Coogan:you uh replete with a glass bottomed swimming pool and a helipad do they make wait do they make super pontoon boats can you get a 400 million dollar pontoon boat what does that do for you if almost certainly can you imagine just a a 300 foot the world will create infinite ways to to make you part with your your hard-earned money yeah and and i'm sure we could arrange a a almost half a billion dollar pond. Okay, team, AI images. I want to see what 400 million dollars gets me if I'm going all in on a pontoon boat. I want to really dominate Lake Michigan. Is Lake Michigan too big for a pontoon boat?

19:56John Coogan:Yeah, I think the pontoon boat is not for like big waves. Big waves. But there's not big waves on Lake Michigan? You can't surf or anything? I don't think so. Surf, yeah. Anyway, so it was a$400 million super yacht. It had a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a helipad. There was just one problem. According to this reporting in the Wall Street Journal, he didn't pay the broker's fee. That is according to a top luxury yacht broker who is now suing Nick Staronsky, a co-founder and chief executive of digital banking giant Revolut, alleging the entrepreneur went behind their back to avoid paying commission on a purchase they had worked on.

20:40John Coogan:Cecil Wright and Partners, a luxury yacht broker, filed the legal action in London's high court over Stronsky's acquisition of Nixie, a 335-foot vessel with four terraces. The broker alleged in a court filing that it was negotiating the purchase for Stronsky when his team secretly contacted the yacht seller directly and agreed to buy the boat, avoiding roughly$20 million in standard commission, the amount the dealer now claims it is owed. In January, Stronsky's team allegedly told Cecil Wright to hold off on contacting the vessel's seller, Canadian billionaire and former hockey player Patrick DiVigi, and said they would talk again the following week, according to the filing.

21:28John Coogan:The filing claims that by next week, Stronsky's team had already arranged to buy the boat directly from Dovigi, bypassing the broker entirely. It was Cecil Wright that brought the yacht to Stronsky's attention and introduced the Revolut co-founder and the owner. Matt Young says, unbelievable, taking food off the table of that luxury yacht broker's family.

21:52John Coogan:A spokesman for the Stronsky family office said, we are aware of the claim. It is without merit and it will be defended. He says he's not guilty. Nixie features a private wellness spa, indoor and outdoor cinemas, two movie theaters. Now we're talking. As well as a Japanese teppanyaki grill, according to Boat International. Pull up this picture that Tyler just shared. I think this is what Nixie looks like. Yeah? Let's see it. When charted, it is equipped with a variety of water toys, including a luxury C-Bob water sled and inflatable blob launchers. Is this the pontoon boat? The luxury pontoon boat?