Jeff Dean: belief

Transcript context

…Compute quotas, where basically he was like, okay, David worked at OpenAI as VP Engine and then he worked at Google. He was like, fundamentally, OpenAI was willing to go all in, like, bet the farm on one thing, whereas Google was more democratic. Everyone had a quota. And I was like, okay, if you believe in scaling as an important thing, that’s an important organizational-wide decision to do. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think I would somewhat agree with that. I mean, I think I actually wrote a one-page memo saying we were being stupid by fragmenting our resources. So in particular, at the time, we had efforts within Google Research. And in the brain team in particular, on large language models. We also had efforts on multimodal models in other parts of brain and Google Research. And then Legacy DeepMind had efforts like Chinchilla models and Flamingo models. And so really, we were fragmenting not only our compute across those separate efforts, but also our best people and our best. And so I said, this is just stupid. Why don’t we combine things and have one effort to train an awesome single unified model that is multimodal from the start, that’s good at everything. And that was the origin of the Gemini effort. And my one-page memo worked, which is good. Did you have the name? Because also for those who don’t know, you named Gemini.…

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