Stephen Morris

He's out there on Twitter shilling for something they like to call Nano Banana 2, which generates short videos.

I would categorize them personally as AI slop.

But you can see that Google might be able to sell this technology into advertising, creating full custom video text advertising campaigns in the future.

And Demis is certainly much more present as a booster of the commercial aspect of this technology than he has been before.

And some of the changes he's made at DeepMind are trying to transform it from this more academically oriented lab into a more competitive one.

For example, one story that we wrote about was the publication of its kind of cutting edge research.

A lot of the scientists and researchers and engineers at DeepMind wanted to put their research out as soon as possible into the marketplace, upload them online so that their fellow scientists and researchers could absorb it, praise them presumably, but then also build off the technology.

Dennis ended this.

He said, no, there's going to be a six-month lag because we're essentially giving away some of our most novel research to free for our competition.

And this was quite controversial internally because it seemed to many people who were kind of in AI for the more academic and research side, moving towards AGI for the benefit of humanity, as opposed to the benefit of Google's bottom line, seemed like a pretty clear shift.

Yeah, it's gone from like, he still tweets about, you know, these cutting edge like research that goes in nature or the journal of this or that.

But then next it'll be followed by a tweet, look at this picture of a Labrador and a party hat in a flying car that flights off the edge that nano banana has generated.

Isn't this great?

And you're like, do you really care about that?

Or is this just part of your new expanded responsibilities as essentially an employee of Alphabet?

So Dennis sits within this like interesting constellation of very capable, very competitive people.

But I do think he can lay claim to being Google's secret weapon.

Elon Musk is very fond of saying that Google didn't buy DeepMind.

This is a long-term reverse takeover of Google by an AI research lab, in addition to being probably one of the cheapest tech deals of all time in retrospect.

So I think we need to set where Demis, you know, sits within the Alphabet organization in its appropriate context.