Thread

Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

800 points · 855 comments · colesantiago

adolph · 1785946441 · focus · HN ↗
"Dean and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider.:
Kinsley Gaffe: A mistake whereby a politician inadvertently says something truthful which they had not meant to reveal.
<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe
1. inerte · 1785946660 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't get what you mean?
  To me the biggest news is Jeff and Sanjay leaving Google... but then not really, since Google will be "an investor". I guess that's sorta their retirement plan? And is Discovery Loop actually part of Alphabet? So complicated.
  1. owlninja · 1785946812 · focus · HN ↗
    I think he was referring to an obvious typo "publicity benefit corporation"
  2. tonfa · 1785949665 · focus · HN ↗
    Google is just an investor, it's not a subsidiary.
2. xdavidliu · 1786026443 · focus · HN ↗
  the typo was the Axios article, not from Google's own announcement
WarmWash · 1785946461 · focus · HN ↗
Absolute earthquake at Deepmind the last few months...
1. FartyMcFarter · 1785946521 · focus · HN ↗
  What do you mean?
  1. huntertwo · 1785946727 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no Gemini 3.5 pro despite multiple announcements?
  2. WarmWash · 1785947266 · focus · HN ↗
    If you search "Deepmind departures" you'll see a string of high profile ones. This is also coupled with the numerous 3.5 pro delays (and strongly suspected underperformance when released).
    Something was definitely going down internally.
xtreak29 · 1785946536 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724
> Announcing Discovery Loop!
> I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
1. [deleted] · 1785947307 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
2. manvel_hn · 1785947675 · focus · HN ↗
  It's quite interesting that those events are happening at the same moment. I wonder whether they are related
  1. aix1 · 1785947966 · focus · HN ↗
    I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.
  2. lostdog · 1785949829 · focus · HN ↗
    Some do-nothing EVP probably just got control over the Gemini org
3. jgilias · 1785947845 · focus · HN ↗
  Is it _that_ Jeff Dean?
  <a href="https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts
  1. pdpi · 1785949477 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, him.
  2. 12345hn6789 · 1785950454 · focus · HN ↗
    "Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points."
    ahahah golden.
    Will be following their journey
  3. judah · 1785951633 · focus · HN ↗
    > When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE)
    Uh oh...
  4. AceJohnny2 · 1785960600 · focus · HN ↗
    Fun fact: the Jeff Dean Facts was started by Kenton Varda (kentonv around here [1]), as a joke inside Google. He has expressed regret that it eclipsed Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom Jeff Dean basically did pair-programming with.
    [1] also known for open-sourcing ProtoBufs v2, creating CapnProto and Sandstorm, and commenting on the recent Cloudflare OS post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996
4. throwaw12 · 1785948047 · focus · HN ↗
  Is Jeff also leaving Google?
  I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team
  1. compiler-guy · 1785948418 · focus · HN ↗
    They are leaving Google, but Google is an investor in the new company. So a split, but not exactly a divorce. Or something.
  2. colesantiago · 1785948450 · focus · HN ↗
    > I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team
    This is probably the only time some prominent VCs would be active during August, only for Jeff Dean & Co's company.
    I can see them now frantically negotiating, responding and firing off emails right now during their holidays to get an allocation in Jeff's new company.
  3. tcp_handshaker · 1785949048 · focus · HN ↗
    Would love to hear the pitch: We never had the lead in AI and now definitely lost it, despite the gazillions dollars and engineering resources of Google, but now will be different?
5. stefan_ · 1785948734 · focus · HN ↗
  Turns out you can't pay em as much as VC will, haha
  1. dominotw · 1785949494 · focus · HN ↗
    its a public benefit corp
6. jcfrei · 1785949340 · focus · HN ↗
  I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to much more data: Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments - and so on. And they need the data in much higher fidelity than you can currently access. If we just feed AI with all the knowledge we've acquired it's much harder for it to become smarter than us - it basically needs it's own eyes, ears, nose and so on.
  1. Oras · 1785953188 · focus · HN ↗
    > Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available
    I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better
  2. tomnicholas1 · 1785956314 · focus · HN ↗
    > Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments
    There are PetaBytes of important scientific data locked in archival file formats. The first step is to make this efficiently readable.
    <a href="https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr" rel="nofollow">https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659254">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659254
7. mosura · 1785951113 · focus · HN ↗
  Is the subtext that Demis was trying to block what Dean etc wanted to do and so they had to leave Google in order to do it?
epolanski · 1785946563 · focus · HN ↗
That's..huge. Hassabis has been the most important figure of the last 15 years in AI.
Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.
tosh · 1785946576 · focus · HN ↗
can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
1. colesantiago · 1785946901 · focus · HN ↗
  It is good for Demis and Google overall.
  This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era.
  Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms.
  The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.
  1. sashank_1509 · 1785947936 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree sundar will step down but I’m not sure if this means they’re grooming Demis to takeover. I suspect not, and someone else might take over.
  2. aix1 · 1785948316 · focus · HN ↗
    > this could be a path for Demis to be CEO in the future in the AI era
    His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no?
    P.S. I think his real interest is Isomorphic, and his new role will offer fewer distractions.
  3. tosh · 1785948463 · focus · HN ↗
    ty!
  4. lokar · 1785949073 · focus · HN ↗
    My impression, inside and out of G, was that Sundar (and Ruth) were about scaling down R&D expenses (as a fraction of revenue), and focusing on exploiting the monopolies.
    Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.
  5. junesix · 1785949252 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't see Demis becoming CEO. He's a scientist and researcher. He wouldn't want to be bogged down by minutiae of corporate politics, org structure, government relations, mobile hardware, etc. Chair lets him have authority to explore any path of interest without overhead of operations.
  6. JacobAsmuth · 1785950168 · focus · HN ↗
    > mobile era CEO
    He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.
  7. stevemk14ebr · 1785952759 · focus · HN ↗
    You're crazy of you think Demis is CEO of alphabet material. He's an accomplished AI researcher, Google does about 10000 other things than AI.
  8. davidpapermill · 1786001472 · focus · HN ↗
    When someone is moved to Chair at their startup it’s usually a gentle way to change leadership.
    I’d guess Google’s execs are unhappy with the way they’ve been left behind in LLMs.
    The position at Anthropic seemed to be that LLMs were not the way forward.
    They may prove to be correct over the long term, but commercially that view is “wrong”.
    It’s a divide between a research oriented and commercial point of view.
    For DeepMind, this is what happens when you take the money. Very rational to do so at the time, but it does have inevitable long term consequences.
    For Google, it’s repeating the same mistake they made before: they should be taking the long view and looking beyond the tech we have today to leapfrog their competitors. But tbh I’m not sure such a behemoth can do that (I have no idea how Steve Jobs managed to do that). They’d have been better to reallocate some of the capex to letting Demis do his thing.
    Another way of putting it: this is the opposite of “founder mode.”
jarpschope · 1785946650 · focus · HN ↗
I found this article more thorough:
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leadership-deepmind-chief-shifts-role-2026-08-05/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...
xnx · 1785946651 · focus · HN ↗
> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.
Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
1. Analemma_ · 1785951077 · focus · HN ↗
  For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?
  1. xnx · 1785951638 · focus · HN ↗
    Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system
  2. CamperBob2 · 1785951771 · focus · HN ↗
    Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler.
    Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other.
    A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.
  3. basch · 1785952266 · focus · HN ↗
    As much as everyone wants to pay accomplished celebrities, all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves. A guard passing torch can be opportunity.
    Now, whether Google is the right environment to nurture, that’s its own quandary.
  4. tuesdaynight · 1785954792 · focus · HN ↗
    It just depends on what are the most upvoted comments in HN. If they are bearish, you can be sure that you should be bullish in your investments. Meta was supposed to be broken as a business already, OpenAI and Anthropic would be failures as well.
  5. tim333 · 1785960123 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe they'll replace Hassabis with someone more focussed on beating OAI and Anthropic at chatbots? He always seemed a bit more into science, protein folding, new drugs and the like.
  6. sva_ · 1785961217 · focus · HN ↗
    I keep hearing this, but Hassabis did not leave Google/Alphabet. He merely changed from an administrative position to a more technical one.
  7. losvedir · 1785963547 · focus · HN ↗
    I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it.
    Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their position Apple, they do have a model, so they're not totally beholden to another for AI (like Apple is using Gemini!).
    But beyond that, for training the model they have YouTube, and of course they have their crawler and index, and the billions of users.
    I think HN skews coding agent focused, but that's not really a market for Google. I expect we will have coding specific models in the future, but Google wants a more general intelligence, to handle search queries, be able to connect email to chat to calendar and tasks, and so on. I don't find Gemini that much worse than the other big models for non-coding things.
  8. aroman · 1785997770 · focus · HN ↗
    Revenue, data, and stamina.
2. forrestthewoods · 1785951355 · focus · HN ↗
  Whoa. So is Jeff effectively leaving Google to work on this new venture full time? Or is the venture a side project? It sounds like the former. I’m sure he’ll still have internal access as an advisor of sorts. But this feels like a seismic change. Much larger than I initially realized?
  1. clueless · 1785952959 · focus · HN ↗
    it's a new venture that he can then sell back to google, and continue his ongoing loop
3. [deleted] · 1785951998 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
4. omoikane · 1785962537 · focus · HN ↗
  > Sanjay (who just joined Twitter)
  Clarification: this comment is saying Sanjay Ghemawat joined Twitter as a user recently (new account @Sanjay_Ghemawat as of July 2026), as opposed to Sanjay working for Twitter the company.
  1. worldsavior · 1785964397 · focus · HN ↗
    Such bad wording wow.
5. Eueudhsbsj32 · 1785965002 · focus · HN ↗
  > It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
  It think the vast majority is what the decision to leave says about the overall sentiment at Google, not the value of these two individuals.
6. oliver236 · 1785967456 · focus · HN ↗
  you mean x, right? just to fully understand
ChrisArchitect · 1785946675 · focus · HN ↗
Source: <a href="https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203
(<a href="https://xcancel.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203)
eamag · 1785946695 · focus · HN ↗
Google's stock dropped 5% right away, 200billion of value
1. peter422 · 1785946769 · focus · HN ↗
  In theory I think the stock should be going up because his tenure has found Google getting left behind.
2. rvz · 1785946948 · focus · HN ↗
  And? I bought more. This is excellent news.
  This over-reaction is why people can't see over a long time horizon.
  This is great news for Google as they realize that Sundar is the problem and he will soon leave Google for Demis to be the new CEO of Alphabet (Google) which I am predicting. [0]
  [0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868160">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868160
  1. xnx · 1785947770 · focus · HN ↗
    AI is critically important to Google, but there's a lot more to Google than just having a frontier AI model. Do Demis skills line up with what the whole company needs? It's going to be tough to beat Sundar's 1200% increase in stock price.
  2. mupuff1234 · 1785948008 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would they do this extra step if that were the case?
  3. SpicyLemonZest · 1785948897 · focus · HN ↗
    I sold out of my position. I can imagine a story where it works out in the long term, but I don't see how this doesn't cause terrible retention problems in the short to medium term. I felt a pull to launch a startup when I heard Jeff Dean was leaving, and I'm a long time big corp employee who hasn't been at Google in over a decade.
3. aix1 · 1785947649 · focus · HN ↗
  It's weird for an announcement like this to drop in the middle of a trading day. I wonder if it got leaked, forcing the timing.
toshinoriyagi · 1785946727 · focus · HN ↗
Deepmind always worked on some of the coolest architectures. Following things like AlphaStar, AlphaGo, and more were extremely exciting and felt like the hacker persona of machine learning. I hope Google can take advantage of this awesome team. They've done incredible work.
zuzululu · 1785946793 · focus · HN ↗
anybody watching the pace of output from Gemini team has been nothing but disappointing. meanwhile anthropic and openai has surpassed them.
I do wonder if anybody working at Google can give us an insight why the chaos and lack of competitiveness?
1. frollogaston · 1785954266 · focus · HN ↗
  Not GDM, but tech island was strangling when I was there. Everyone will probably say different things.
htrp · 1785946802 · focus · HN ↗
Between Shazeer and these guys
Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads
hypnodrones · 1785946808 · focus · HN ↗
Today I saw one of the most talented engineers I know and worked with leave DeepMind and now I probably know part of the "why". Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.
1. misiti3780 · 1785946946 · focus · HN ↗
  I disagree - I will be surprised if google doesnt win the AI race long term. They have the money, the chips, and the ability to attract talent.
  1. gboss · 1785947094 · focus · HN ↗
    Ever heard of the innovator’s dilemma? Don’t underestimate the inertia of large companies and their unwillingness to pivot from their cash cow.
  2. reducesuffering · 1785947112 · focus · HN ↗
    > ability to attract talent.
    No, the top talent is clearly at Anthropic and OpenAI
  3. hypnodrones · 1785947133 · focus · HN ↗
    Agree that I would (and do) still place my bet on them for the long term. Maybe the outcome will be a couple of good startups seeded and DeepMind _really_ focusing on LLMs now.
  4. DANmode · 1785947271 · focus · HN ↗
    They’d be hard pressed to lose, if it’s what they want.
    They need to route all browser search strings to an LLM, and slowly begin to charge where people will pay. Likely ad space.
  5. nemomarx · 1785947629 · focus · HN ↗
    Are they measurably attracting more talent here? It seems like they're losing some of it right now, so is there public info about numbers of researchers they have or etc
  6. rdtsc · 1785947666 · focus · HN ↗
    I said that too at the start of the year, but that's a looong time in "AI years". I feel like by now they should have announced a Fable-killer model. They may still do it but looking back I am becoming less convinced now than I was 6 months ago.
  7. logicchains · 1785949111 · focus · HN ↗
    They also have the money, the hardware and the talent to be the best cloud infrastructure provider, yet they're still far behind AWS (for good reason, as anyone who's dealt with their customer service will understand).
2. A_D_E_P_T · 1785947037 · focus · HN ↗
  > Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.
  It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier.
  Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche.
  From day one everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market, but it looks more remote than ever. Maybe Hassabis' personal inclination towards AI-for-science, and physics/chemistry in particular -- as opposed to consumer AI and coding AI -- has hurt them commercially.
  1. mlmonkey · 1785947533 · focus · HN ↗
    They are not "asleep at the wheel"; it's just that the people in charge (the "MBA types") have no clue what to do!
    There's an old saying, if you judge a fish's smarts by how well it can ride a bicycle, it will always seem dumb.
    The people who have risen to the top of at Google are built for a different environment than what's needed right now. They are good at playing their political games, sabotaging each other, etc.; i.e. all of the petty games that managers play in big companies. But the AI era demands a different skill set: how to bring together incredibly smart people and forge them into a battle group that will achieve victory in the ongoing battle for AGI! It's as if you have built an army of tanks, but the next battle is being fought on the high seas.
  2. thereitgoes456 · 1785947609 · focus · HN ↗
    I largely agree but I don't know if it's quite so clear cut. From the pricing angle, all competitors except Google, including Chinese models, have incentive to gain market share at all costs, and may be serving tokens at or below cost. I am not sure though, Google could certainly decrease prices if they wanted to.
    For agentic work, but especially for web search, 3.6 Flash has an important leg up, its fast speed, that no other model comes close to matching. I guess nobody pays attention to it because it's not the one big flashy number that you compare to other models.
  3. krapht · 1785947907 · focus · HN ↗
    Is Gemini really doomed? I'm still bullish on Google: 1) they have more free cash flow and capital than God due to the ads business 2) they have data - intent from web searches, youtube videos, google books and music 3) they have dedicated inference hardware
    for all these reasons, is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? some day the pace of improvement will slow, and google will vacuum up the market. they'll be able to compete with open-weight models just on pure cost advantage from their vertical integration
  4. bryanlarsen · 1785948112 · focus · HN ↗
    - They're making a lot of money selling Tensor to Anthropic. If Nvidia's $4T market cap is justifiable, Google's position as one of the other top AI chip seller is worth a lot.
    - In a world where open source Chinese models decimate Frontier models ability to charge a high price, it's the operators of efficient inference data centers that will win. Like Google
    - Google is probably the biggest provider of "free" AI because it's on Google.com. That forces them to focus on cost. And in a commodity market, low-cost providers are the ones that make the money.
  5. jorvi · 1785948143 · focus · HN ↗
    Google doesn't need to compete. 'everyone' is locked into them via the Gapps (mostly Gmail and Maps) and Android ecosystems. Same with Apple, and Microsoft on the B2B side. It's only Anthropic, OpenAI and everyone else that _need_ to compete because switching models is painless. And they have no other revenue streams.
    10 years from now, its gonna be Google, Apple and Microsoft left standing in the AI game. Well, until the US wakes up and starts attempting to break the oligopoly like the EU has recently started to do.
  6. peterlk · 1785948645 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think it matters that much for Google. They need to not fall hopelessly behind, but I don’t think there’s a strong economic reason for Google to burn the kind of capex that the frontier labs are burning. Strategically, I think they’re probably doing better than OpenAI and Anthropic. The Gemini models are open, and they are what researchers are working with (see neuronpedia as an example). Over time, this will give them a strategic advantage for the same reasons that open source wins over proprietary. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have massive capex that needs to be returned to investors while their margins are being undercut by Kimi/Deepseek/Qwen. Google can wait around for the coming frontier lab profitability crisis and cruise right on by with their Apple contract and owned data centers to pick up the pieces and exceed the existing frontier labs.
  7. chasd00 · 1785949438 · focus · HN ↗
    > everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market
    my take on this is eventually the money is going to run out and there's going to be acquisitions and consolidation. I think that's when Google will come out on top.
3. artemonster · 1785947178 · focus · HN ↗
  why?
  1. [deleted] · 1785948246 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. hypnodrones · 1785949105 · focus · HN ↗
    It seems that people wanting to focus on AI-for-science instead of topping LLM benchmarks don't have a place anymore in DeepMind.
4. cute_boi · 1785947497 · focus · HN ↗
  If cursor can train model, I see no reason Google can't do it. They just have to hire more people and try on multiple angle.
5. dgellow · 1785948179 · focus · HN ↗
  I’m wondering if they just don’t believe that there is a good business model to be made as a frontier AI lab
  Edit: hmm, no, they seem to be mentioning AGI and frontier models in <a href="https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...
6. uejfiweun · 1785992766 · focus · HN ↗
  I think Google realized that it's more profitable to sell compute to AI labs than to make AI. They are not an ideologically driven company like Anthropic. They very much turned into a conventional company that just wants to protect the bottom line. This was evident even back when they had LAMDA and refused to release it.
htrp · 1785946839 · focus · HN ↗
Hassabis is being promoted to Chair of Deepmind
1. TheqO · 1786013266 · focus · HN ↗
  Who is going to be sitting on him?
tacomonstrous · 1785946931 · focus · HN ↗
Everyone commenting here seems to take this to mean he's leaving Google, when that's not what the article says.
1. brokencode · 1785947499 · focus · HN ↗
  Clearly his influence is going to be less though.
  And most likely this is a calculated step to avoid freaking people out, even though he is effectively leaving.
  1. baq · 1785947699 · focus · HN ↗
    Not at all clear.
    To me it looks like he’ll be in a position to actually be unhobble DeepMind - reminder DM was sitting on a ChatGPT product for a whole year before ChatGPT got released (LMChat) and Google didn’t let them release it.
  2. VirusNewbie · 1785949994 · focus · HN ↗
    What? His influence is going to be larger.
2. paxys · 1785949239 · focus · HN ↗
  I’m willing to bet a lot of money that the “chairman” role is a contractual obligation and he be will be gone the day it expires.
3. k1rd · 1785950398 · focus · HN ↗
  omg, you are right, he is leaving google!
Handy-Man · 1785946975 · focus · HN ↗
Jeff and Sanjay both leaving!
atleastoptimal · 1785947160 · focus · HN ↗
I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this.
OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI to work at Google since their benefits will be capped by Google being large + having public company obligations.
1. LZ_Khan · 1785947343 · focus · HN ↗
  I've always thought this as well.
  1. abakker · 1785947784 · focus · HN ↗
    Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?
2. onlyrealcuzzo · 1785947875 · focus · HN ↗
  There is no other way to describe the Gemini 3.5 pro delay than as a complete and unmitigated disaster.
  It's a huge company.
  It's unlikely there is any one person to blame (and entirely possible he has none of it). But things need to change.
  1. sigmoid10 · 1785948239 · focus · HN ↗
    Google was always at the frontier of real research, but has been abysmal at shipping good products (at least since Sundar). The core company is run for margins and interest rates by the business people nowadays.
  2. tanh · 1785948254 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah. I’m guessing they’re behind the Chinese models in capability now
  3. overfeed · 1785948399 · focus · HN ↗
    > But things need to change.
    Not all change is good, as proven by Zuckerberg's response after the lackluster Llama 4 release. The radical restructuring appears to have made things worse.
  4. pixl97 · 1785948626 · focus · HN ↗
    Huge companies tend to make money from network effects, rent seeking, and lock in. They tend to be horrifically bad when it comes to innovation, especially when it may disrupt exiting departments in the company. Those departments will fight for their life and generally muck things up.
    Very few companies have leadership that can prevent this infighting and force teams on directed goals.
  5. godwinson__4-8 · 1785948874 · focus · HN ↗
    People keep saying the same thing about Google lagging behind and always end up looking rather silly. Google was going to lose search to OpenAI. Then people complained there was too much AI in Google search. Now it's pretty good and par for the course.
    Yes it's a huge company.
    So they are slower. Then they will surface it across their massive product base and keep generating cash. While having a hand in Anthropic and others via investment anyway.
    Google doesn't need to offer you the bleeding edge at startup pace. They're playing a different game. When the bubble pops they will be well positioned really no matter the outcome to continue to capitalize as their competitors implode or get absorbed.
    The idea a delay is a "complete and unmitigated disaster" is just laughable. People have been saying this about Google since ChatGPT first invaded the public consciousness. Google will continue to do well, the histrionics of people like you aside.
  6. EthanHeilman · 1785949108 · focus · HN ↗
    I disagree. Google is one of the few parties that can monetize AI because Google has a massive moat in the form of their products: gmail, chrome, photos, search, etc... and Google already has the custom-built chips and datacenters.
    Google spending money on competing head to head with your LLMs is a waste of money for Google. If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both. All the investors throwing money into OpenAI, Anthropic, are just accidentally subsidizing Google's product development. Google shouldn't spend its AI research capital in an arms race with Anthropic but instead should invest in AI approaches that no one else is investigating at scale. That way Google can hedge against LLMs hitting a wall.
    There is a real but small danger to Google that Anthropic replaces Google as a search engine, but that is an uphill fight for Anthropic. Google has massive brand recognition, network effects with gmail and chrome, Anthropic can't just copy what works from Google. On the other hand Google can copy what works for Anthropic. Google would have to play poorly to lose that fight.
    Probably the worse case for Google is that software becomes so cheap and easy to create and maintain that all of Google's product offerings become commoditized. Even in that world Google has a lock on infrastructure. Perhaps ASI software creation completely removes that as well? If so we are living in a post-singularity world and probably the stockmarket doesn't exist anymore either.
3. jmyeet · 1785948187 · focus · HN ↗
  We'll see if anyone gets to cash in on those. All you need is one down round and that gets wiped out. Or if the IPO gets delayed and disappoints then the stock can drop well before the lockouts expire. OpenAI and Anthropic are essentially offering Monopoly money in the hopes that one day you can exchange it for real money.
  1. tonfa · 1785949051 · focus · HN ↗
    > OpenAI and Anthropic are essentially offering Monopoly money in the hopes that one day you can exchange it for real money.
    I thought employees have already had opportunities to cash out (there's enough funding rounds for that).
    (Tho how much you can sell was limited, iirc to double digit millions...)
4. xnx · 1785948417 · focus · HN ↗
  OpenAI and Anthropic have the freedom to do absolutely insane things like negligently hack other companies. It would be stock price suicide if anything even remotely happened with Google.
  1. VulgarExigency · 1785948835 · focus · HN ↗
    There's no doubt in my mind that they set up the conditions for their models to escape the sandboxes. "haha oops our incredibly powerful models escaped we need 1 trillion more dollars and really this is yet another reason why no one else should be allowed to build this technology"
  2. [deleted] · 1785950742 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. [deleted] · 1785950856 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  4. somenameforme · 1785952681 · focus · HN ↗
    Google's AI was telling people to put elmer's glue on pizza to help the cheese stick [1], Gemini was turning the Founding Fathers black [2], and more. Oh and the pizza recipe was based on a joke from a reddit user named "fucksmith" - part of data that Google apparently paid some $60 million to Reddit to access. The one and only effect of this was lots of amusing posts and articles. Their stock price went up during the whole ordeal.
    [1] - <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/05/31/google-ai-glue-to-pizza-viral-blunders/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/05/31/google-ai-...
    [2] - <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/02/23/google-gemini-images-stereotypes-controversy" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2024/02/23/google-gemini-images-stereo...
  5. user43928 · 1785953145 · focus · HN ↗
    If Google put out a blog post about Gemini 4 having escaped its sandbox via 0-day exploit to then hack other companies, I unironically believe this would result in a boost to their stock price.
    They could really use some encouraging news about the competitiveness of their AI lab.
  6. ddp26 · 1785955725 · focus · HN ↗
    Would it though? Meta and Microsoft have had very scandalous AI things happen, and their shares didn't tank (or quickly recovered)
  7. ur-whale · 1786021181 · focus · HN ↗
    > It would be stock price suicide if anything even remotely happened with Google.
    aka they're dead in the water.
5. overgard · 1785948724 · focus · HN ↗
  I think something that doesn't get talked about a lot is how bad most large tech companies are at creating new products, in general. Like, if you look at most big tech companies, they have their core offering that got them to be really large and rich, and a few other products that are somewhat successful, and then a really long tail of markets they try to enter and failed at, or projects that were modestly successful but got killed because they weren't game changers (RIP Google Reader). Most of the time when a large company does something new that succeeds, it's via an acquisition of a smaller company (ie, Google with Android or Meta with Instagram and Whatsapp)
  It's funny, because I think the company that's going to be best positioned coming out of this bubble is in fact google, because they have the expertise and the capital. But I honestly can't tell you right now what their AI product even is -- I've seen so many things go into the graveyard a few months after its launched that I'm utterly confused what their offering even is at this point.
6. mrpopo · 1785948737 · focus · HN ↗
  > people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI
  People who truly care about becoming rich*
  DeepMind made enormous transformative discoveries, for instance in the world of protein folding. But that will just save human lives, not let CEOs fire their people to grab a larger piece of cake for themselves.
7. vineyardmike · 1785948834 · focus · HN ↗
  The answer is far more benign.
  They getting a higher ROI renting their TPUs to Anthropic et al instead of performing training and serving their own models. Google cloud has insane backlog, and has rapidly expanded to satisfy it. While those DCs get built, they’re cannibalizing their own products for it.
  This makes sense because (1) they are investors in Anthropic, so they still win and (2) they can always catch up on model training later when the profit opportunity shifts, or abandon it if there is no way to recapture that value.
  1. WarmWash · 1785950104 · focus · HN ↗
    Awfully ironic that Google makes more money (probably an order or magnitude or so) from it's direct competitors than it does from a it's own product.
  2. jatins · 1785951245 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think so. If Kimi and Deepseek can launch models better than Gemini with much much lesser resources then it is increasingly looking like an organization issue at Google
  3. ilaksh · 1785956290 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the reason Google hasn't prioritized larger models that are more intelligent than everyone else's, even though they probably could, is because they have 4 billion active users already. For example, they send AI Overviews for a large portion of Google searches now.
    So I think they have to prioritize scaling for their models to a higher degree than other groups. Being within say 5% or so in most cases is probably adequate and matters more overall for their user base than being the absolute best coder. So they may be setting compute constraints for training or inference that are firmer than other teams.
  4. chermi · 1785971071 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think Google is that freaking short-sighted. Even if you're not trying to be frontier, the value of having domain knowledge via experience for AI is worth saving internal compute alone. By all accounts Google believes in ai as much as everyone else.
    If AI turns out 1/100 as important as they seem to think, it would be insane to intentionally be slack on it.
8. logicchains · 1785948847 · focus · HN ↗
  It's not a ML talent problem. You don't need to be a genius deep learning researcher to think "Hey, maybe if we massively throttle and degrade the quality of our model while still charging the same price, that might drive people away" (as happened with Gemini 2.5 Pro, the one model where Google really was SOTA). Google's likely been providing insufficient training compute to DeepMind the same way they've been nickel-and-diming their customers, funneling it all to Search instead because that's where the money comes from.
  1. underlipton · 1785975686 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that what's happening? Search has sucked for a while, and I'd just assumed it was partly because they'd been pushing compute to AI-related activities.
9. cedws · 1785949745 · focus · HN ↗
  Is this not an apples-and-pears comparison? DeepMind is a research lab, not an LLM-pilled money furnace.
10. majormajor · 1785950268 · focus · HN ↗
  That was true early but OpenAI/Anthropic have done a ton of hiring over the past couple years at already-huge valuations, as much on the strength of big current base salary + equity, not just future increase speculation.
  1. solenoid0937 · 1785959473 · focus · HN ↗
    Everyone knows there isn't a moat.
    No one joins OpenAI/Anthropic unless they think these companies will reach superintelligence.
    So most people joining believe their equity will 10-100x even from where it is today.
    (Coincidentally, the talent that believes we will reach AGI overlaps a lot with the best talent, which has a magnetic effect.)
11. Bjorkbat · 1785950337 · focus · HN ↗
  One theory I've been entertaining is that whenever GPT-3.5 came out a lot of people were talking about the "bitter lesson" and how scale was all we really needed to get to AGI. No need for any fancy tricks, just release a larger model trained on more data, by the time we released a hypothetical "GPT-5 sized" model we'd have AGI.
  Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been playing by this playbook of focusing on scale and training data, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic have done so well because they are likely doing much more interesting things to improve their models over time. It makes sense when you realize that one of Google's key strengths, besides talent, is that they have an incredible amount of data they can use for training due to being both the world's leading search engine as well as having all that video data from YouTube. Scaling the training data makes more sense to them than it does to Anthropic and OpenAI, who are both relatively data-disadvantaged.
  You can kind of see this when you look at the Gemini 3 scorecard when it came out (<a href="https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/gemini-3/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/g...) and notice that while it wasn't as good as Claude And GPT at coding, it scored higher on a bunch of other non-coding benchmarks, and I think the reason why is simply because of Google's data advantage.
  If true, I feel even more vindicated for believing that the "scale is all we need" narrative was bullshit.
  1. redox99 · 1785950828 · focus · HN ↗
    Other than attention optimizations and other minor changes, the top Chinese models (which are way better than gemini) have basically the same architecture as GPT2. Of course RL is key for agentic workloads, but I'd say it's correct that progress has been mostly scaling models,adding more data and cleaning it better.
  2. aidis9136264 · 1785974866 · focus · HN ↗
    Google has a ton of smart researchers trying all sorts of stuff. They didn’t really go all in on any one thing. They hedge their bets.
    But they suck at harnesses, developer tooling etc. their internal environment is very complex and an intern on a MacBook with codex can probably move faster than a seasoned deepmind engineer
  3. nolist_policy · 1786000571 · focus · HN ↗
    > Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been playing by this playbook of focusing on scale and training data, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic have done so well because they are likely doing much more interesting things to improve their models over time.
    Google Gemma disproves this
12. [deleted] · 1785952537 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
13. deeviant · 1785953447 · focus · HN ↗
  I think it's just more about market incentive. At it's core, LLMs are bad for google's previous business model, which was to send you to as many sites 'good enough' for what you were looking for and plant Ad land mines along the way, in the search results and in the websites themselves.
  The new paradigm is you ask the llm a question, get the answer and cutout the middle man. (yes the answer may or may not be as good as the old google result, but for the sake of the argument lets say it is), Google was in danger of simply getting their arm cut off. so they focused on scaling so they could add LLMs to the search, which they largely have. You can't offer an opus like model on something as big as search (and which is offered for 'free'), so they focused on that model, and the infrastructure to run it, because they cannot afford to lose search.
  Meanwhile, they know the power of frontier models, they are working to have the infrastructure to be a huge player in them and I'm sure they will have a frontier capable model, eventually. They are playing a longer game, because they can, and I think it's going to work out very well for them.
14. ralph84 · 1785965130 · focus · HN ↗
  Google was offering researchers the Bell Labs/Xerox PARC model of comfortable budgets and pay but capped upside. And just like with Bell Labs and Xerox PARC the inventions at Google got productized elsewhere by people chasing the uncapped upside. Google would have been happy to keep LLMs in the research lab forever and never productize any of it. ChatGPT forced their hand.
15. chermi · 1785970930 · focus · HN ↗
  This makes a lot of sense to me. Probably doesn't explain everything but I could see it explaining a lot. Could also explain openai and anthropic delaying IPO (among other factors)
16. [deleted] · 1785972755 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
17. SamvitJ · 1785973112 · focus · HN ↗
  From what I've heard, DeepMind's pay structure is not tied to Google compensation bands. Which means that top performers and key hires can be and are compensated extremely generously if the need calls for it. Another Alphabet subsidiary, Waymo, was well-known for doing this back in the day.
  But yes, even large RSU grants cannot replicate the upside of joining a company that increases in valuation 1000X, but to be fair, that is not a position the vast majority of OpenAI or Anthropic employees find themselves in either.
18. elAhmo · 1786018089 · focus · HN ↗
  DeepMind is just a part of Google which does research stuff, and Google is a massive company that does loads of things but mostly sells ads.
  OpenAI and Anthropic are in a completely different game, their primary business model is making a product out of advancements that come out of DeepMind and co.
tough · 1785947182 · focus · HN ↗
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. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left-google-deepmind" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
1. bkishan · 1785947288 · focus · HN ↗
  what was the post?
  1. tough · 1785947323 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left-google-deepmind" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
2. TulliusCicero · 1785947840 · focus · HN ↗
  ...you think they've only been planning this for a couple weeks?
  1. tough · 1785947957 · focus · HN ↗
    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
3. cma · 1785948419 · focus · HN ↗
  Alex Turner discusses a bit here at this timestamp:
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGlJQHVeKIA&t=14m27s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGlJQHVeKIA&t=14m27s
[deleted] · 1785947195 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
amberjack · 1785947256 · focus · HN ↗
So how many people from DeepMind have left now? Not looking too good for Google.
bkishan · 1785947258 · focus · HN ↗
By the article, it looks like he's actually stepping up.
1. dwroberts · 1785948071 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah I actually read this more as them scrambling because Jeff Dean is leaving? Because that is the role he is taking up
  1. sailingparrot · 1785950044 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no way a Chief Scientist (essentially IC) role is more important than leading the whole of DeepMind, 6000 people strong, working on the most important product for the future of Alphabet.
    This means Demis wanted a change and to work on other things, it's not Google wanting this.
2. stabbles · 1785948560 · focus · HN ↗
  Your comment says he's stepping up, the HN title says he's stepping down, the article says he's stepping aside. Nobody says if it's a step forward or backward.
  1. bink · 1785949186 · focus · HN ↗
    It's just a jump to the left...
  2. FartyMcFarter · 1785950683 · focus · HN ↗
    We know he's definitely stepping. That's a start.
scrlk · 1785947604 · focus · HN ↗
What happened to the "strike team" that Sergey Brin was leading to try and improve Gemini's coding performance?
1. chanux · 1785949540 · focus · HN ↗
  They tried so hard and got so far..
  1. PessimalDecimal · 1785982343 · focus · HN ↗
    but in the end...
2. frollogaston · 1785954399 · focus · HN ↗
  still waiting on ganpati propagation
  1. stormbeard · 1785982427 · focus · HN ↗
    Found the Googler.
segmondy · 1785947735 · focus · HN ↗
End of an era for Alphabet.
1. abirch · 1785949714 · focus · HN ↗
  I give it a 51% chance of Discovery Loop being acquired by Google
  1. comment0r · 1785950185 · focus · HN ↗
    They are already partially funded by Google.
  2. aix1 · 1785950533 · focus · HN ↗
    I actually think there's a low probability of that.
    The four have so much influence within the company that they could have trivially set this up as part of Alphabet, if they wanted to. They are also ridiculously wealthy.
ra7 · 1785947940 · focus · HN ↗
It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet.
The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
1. brandall10 · 1785955304 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah, a bit surprised that the top comments aren't discussing losing Dean, he's been a figurehead for the company for decades. It's like Apple losing Ive in a way.
  EDIT: "figurehead" - that's all I meant. A notable, public figure from the company who is credited with having a significant impact on its evolution. I'm not making a judgement call on his departure, or Ive's, being good or bad.
  That said... just give it a couple years, they'll be back in a lucrative aquihire.
  1. vjvjvjvjghv · 1785958774 · focus · HN ↗
    Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.
    dannyw · 1785960072 · focus · HN ↗
    The MacBooks certainly got a lot better and more usable.
    Anyone remember the touchpad MBP with no physical escape key and the butterfly keyboard?
    (Respect to many of Ive’s great legacy though)
    zem · 1786042239 · focus · HN ↗
    not true for jeff and sanjay - they kept moving from project to project and delivering transformative results in each.
  2. re-thc · 1785959657 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's like Apple losing Ive in a way.
    Are you sure we should compare it like this? Not sure it implies what you think it does...
  3. crossroadsguy · 1785959826 · focus · HN ↗
    Like Ive? So you mean it’s good for Google?
2. HarHarVeryFunny · 1785960760 · focus · HN ↗
  It seems there's a big shake up on the underperforming Gemini side. Before there was Shazeer (already gone) and Vinyals as co-leads, reporting to Hassabis, now Gemini comes under Kavukcuoglu reporting direct to Pichai as SVP of DeepMind.
  Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside. He had been CEO of DeepMind, but that position no longer exists and it seems Kavukcuoglu is now leading DeepMind with a title of SVP. Hassabis is now just "Chair" of DeepMind, and has been given the newly created title of Alphabet Chief Scientist. Are these just face-saving titles, or does he still have any real influence over Google/DeepMind's pursuit of AGI?
  Shane Legg remains as DeepMind "Chief AGI Scientist", but I wonder if the DeepMind founding mission of creating AGI is really intact, or if he will be next to go. Has DeepMind just become the Gemini division?
  I just found out that David Silver, DeepMind's RL-expert, already left in february, to create a startup "Ineffible Intelligence" focusing on RL-based continual learning.
  1. taurath · 1785961098 · focus · HN ↗
    > Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside.
    Yeah he seemed too reasonable to me, relative to the fervor. Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing to catch up to the ferver that would justify their valuations and investments
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1785962852 · focus · HN ↗
    Probably not going to happen, but I'd love to see Isomorphic Labs separate from Alphabet with Hassabis still as CEO. He's too pure minded to be at company like Google.
    kridsdale1 · 1785964872 · focus · HN ↗
    Same thing happened to Yan LeCun.
    Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.
    WarmWash · 1785965643 · focus · HN ↗
    Google's capex is to capture the compute purchases from the other labs. The amount they are spending on Gemini is probably shockingly low...and hence researchers leaving for better watered pastures.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1785970544 · focus · HN ↗
    > Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing
    I don't get the impression from interviews that Kavukcuoglu is that guy - he seems like a safe pair of hands, but not someone that is on a mission.
    OTOH I don't even think this is the right race to be in.
  2. moscoe · 1785965576 · focus · HN ↗
    I guess his big bet on world models didn’t pay off quickly enough
    justanotherjoe · 1786020221 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's more than that. I made prediction in earlier 2024 that the main players of AI will stick with transformers while second class players will want to transcend it. The difference is admittedly a bit subtle but ai researchers would get it. I wrote it with mamba in mind back then, but google was still trying to come up with the 'next transformers' and one that can remember using weights and all that stuffs. You can say the same abt lecun's and ilya's now.
    My main reasoning was that transformers was the lightning in a bottle and the best work is in extending it instead of transcending it, which requires you to capture another lightning . Which to me appears to miss the assignment. OpenAI, Antrophic, they understand this intimately. Google on the other hand, fell victim to their own ambition.
  3. Cidan · 1785972249 · focus · HN ↗
    CEO of <thing> at Google (not Alphabet) was always an informal title. There is no CEO of Cloud, CEO of YouTube, or CEO of DeepMind within Google internally -- it's always been an SVP role.
    kfse · 1785986028 · focus · HN ↗
    Kamangar, Wojcicki, Mohan were all CEOs of YouTube
    ErikCorry · 1785986333 · focus · HN ↗
    ?? Of course there's a CEO of YouTube.
    cbarrick · 1785990875 · focus · HN ↗
    TK has the formal title of CEO of Cloud.
    CEO of <thing> is a layer above SVP.
    Google has many layers of management.
  4. Keyframe · 1785976519 · focus · HN ↗
    Inevitably, this will lead to Sundar Pichai replacement. I see nothing less. The sooner the better. I can't even tell what Google's focus is, is there any even?
    ulfw · 1785993419 · focus · HN ↗
    Google? Focus? Huh? Focus would be the last word that comes to mind. Honestly, ever.
  5. weatherlite · 1786003644 · focus · HN ↗
    > and has been given the newly created title of Alphabet Chief Scientist. Are these just face-saving titles, or does he still have any real influence over Google/DeepMind's pursuit of AGI?
    Alphabet Chief Scientist doesnt sound like a demotion / lack of influence to me but who knows. We're all just speculating here.
  6. _the_inflator · 1786013567 · focus · HN ↗
    Roughly two years ago suddenly Hassabis was heavily promoted on all Google YouTube channels.
    It was to fight ChatGPT and promote Gemini.
    I think the guy does a very poor job or is simply not the right guy to appear as public figure for Gemini.
    At least he tried. He is a man for everything that is not filmed.
    Google doesn’t really have a person to give Gemini or AI a human face. And that is only consequential because Google never had any public person with any charisma like Jobs, Zuck, Altman.
3. weatherlite · 1786003518 · focus · HN ↗
  > as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet
  IS that a promotion or demotion ?
  1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1786024231 · focus · HN ↗
    To me the most significant part is that he's no longer in charge of DeepMind, the company he created, other than this "Chair" title which sounds meaningless.
    When DeepMind allowed Google to buy them, it obviously had some major immediate positives - access to compute and money - but it seems it should have been obvious that the agreement was too good to be true, that they would be allowed to continue independently on their blue sky research mission to create AGI without any external interference or pressure to create product.
    It seems that Hassabis and his DM co-founders eventually realized the mistake and tried to take DM private again starting c.2018, but of course this failed.
    <a href="https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby/" rel="nofollow">https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-de...
    Now Hassabis has lost control of DeepMind altogether, and it seems to me, as a total outsider, that this is the end of the DeepMind mission to create AGI, at least the Hassabis/Legg definition of AGI as human-level general intelligence, capable of creativity and scientific discovery. Hassabis had always, until very recently, said that he believed it would take a number of additional "Transformer-level" breakthroughs to achieve this type of human-level AGI, while still seeing an LLM as one component of if (which to me seems an admission that the goal has failed - a true human level AGI should be able to learn language, etc, using it's own continual learning mechanisms).
    It seems that DeepMind has now fully become the Google Gemini (LLM) division, trying to create a me-too product.
    In the early days of DeepMind, before Google, before LLMs, I remember a David Silver slide deck titled "Reward is all you need", referring to RL rewards, which I never agreed with (although Rich Sutton might), but does at least reflect the independent thinking at DM, and of course RL not only gave rise to AlphaGo, but has now become central to the continued improvement of LLMs. However, notably David Silver also left DeepMind earlier this year, to found his own startup focusing on RL-based continual learning, presumably feeling that there was no longer a place for that type of research/pursuit at DeepMind.
    Still, LLMs seem to be a destructive enough force on their own that perhaps it should be seen as a positive if research towards more powerful AGI appears to have had a major setback.
    As for the "Alphabet Chief Scientist" title, it seems somewhat irrelevant, as least as far as Google's pursuit of true AGI. Hassabis is the face of beneficial AI, having been Knighted and awarded a Nobel Prize for his work, and it would be a horrendous PR move for Alphabet not to at least appear to be treating him with respect, even if in fact this does reflect him being pushed aside.
  2. anvuong · 1786036378 · focus · HN ↗
    Alphabet is only a holding company. I wonder what kind of authority he has over scientists at Google, Waymo, Deepmind, etc. Probably close to none, so a huge demotion in everything but in title and compensation.
650 · 1785947953 · focus · HN ↗
The first sentence is quite telling
>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…
Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought
1. add-sub-mul-div · 1785948522 · focus · HN ↗
  If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?
2. giwook · 1785948917 · focus · HN ↗
  My opinion is that you're reading way too much into this. Talent is obviously first. Without that you have no products worth speaking of.
3. thewebguyd · 1785948969 · focus · HN ↗
  Hasn't that always been the case with Google? Outside of a few that are mostly good and have stuck around, I've always seen Google has having great tech but being quite bad and making products out of it.
4. garlic_enjoyer · 1785949262 · focus · HN ↗
  I was about to invest in Google, but your compelling observation has swayed me. Now it's obvious to me they are a dying company.
  1. giwook · 1785957154 · focus · HN ↗
    Guess I'm not taking out a second mortgage on my house anymore to invest in $GOOG.
5. JacobAsmuth · 1785950058 · focus · HN ↗
  So then it is similarly telling that compute is second on the list? They have more talent than compute? Layoffs incoming?
6. zdragnar · 1785950729 · focus · HN ↗
  A company is made up of people, and makes products. Products can come and go for many reasons (or any reason) but the company will always have people.
7. cj · 1785950873 · focus · HN ↗
  This is also how Y Combinator operates.
  Founders are first. Ideas are second.
8. bonsai_bar · 1785952718 · focus · HN ↗
  I'd bet my mortgage that if the first sentence was "We've got amazing products, amazing talent, and world-class compute", you'd be in the comments complaining that they didn't put talent first.
9. Terr_ · 1785952919 · focus · HN ↗
  It just tells you about their intended audience: Investors rather than consumers.
  Nowadays, every company—even huge ones—prefers to be seen as a "growth opportunity", so they are trying to play up their ability to create new products which will somehow be so incredible that the line keeps moving up forever.
  That said, there is definitely a correlation between companies chasing new products and leaving old ones to become crap.
10. killerstorm · 1785970274 · focus · HN ↗
  Google's revenue is 10x up in the last 10 years.
utopcell · 1785947966 · focus · HN ↗
Demis stepped down? Who cares? Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google. We are in uncharted territory.
1. FartyMcFarter · 1785950554 · focus · HN ↗
  I think Demis has been way more influential in the past decade. Jeff and Sanjay built a lot of Google's foundational software, but that was a long time ago.
  1. utopcell · 1785952475 · focus · HN ↗
    Demis is great -- this is not a zero-sum game. Who built what, and the relative importance, is an interesting discussion to have, but it's orthogonal to my point.
    Which is: When you think about Google, true, old, "don't be evil", tech excellence Google, you don't think about Demis. You think about Jeff's and Sanjay's geeky, technically uncompromising, faces.
  2. DannyBee · 1785955628 · focus · HN ↗
    Both are very smart.
    But Jeff was responsible for a lot more of what is actually used today than Demis.
    Demis is responsible for a lot more of the hype though ;)
    I think saying Jeff's contributions were a long time ago must represent some kind of lack of understanding of Jeff's recent contributions.
    Jeff has still been focused more on infrastructure, and that is just more hidden most of the time.
    I would say,if i was forced to pick someone whose vision to follow, it would definitely be Jeff and not Demis, even today.
throwaw12 · 1785948007 · focus · HN ↗
This move was expected when Google shifted focus to Gemini-only.
tanh · 1785948087 · focus · HN ↗
I guess Demis was about world models and the old talent saw the writing on the wall. Noam was a big one and this is just a continuation of that.
Don’t understand how Sundar is still running things, though.
wmf · 1785948195 · focus · HN ↗
He's failing up and out of the blast zone. He won't be responsible if Gemini 4 fails.
ChrisArchitect · 1785948199 · focus · HN ↗
Related:
The next chapter of our AI momentum
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755
[deleted] · 1785948203 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
antirez · 1785948269 · focus · HN ↗
Chinese labs are the proof that there is no need of big names, but of the right mindset and agility. It's those last things that Google truly misses, but now they are missing for a long time, and outside the AI divisions too, in almost every department of the company.
sidcool · 1785948281 · focus · HN ↗
Sundar Pichai: @DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs.
<a href="https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093
So it's not stepping down, right?
1. anvuong · 1785948512 · focus · HN ↗
  But Alphabet is just a holding company, what does Chief Scientist of Alphabet even mean?
  1. atonse · 1785948590 · focus · HN ↗
    It means "please, he's still here, don't let the stock plummet"
2. flakiness · 1785948554 · focus · HN ↗
  Chairman is a stepping stone for a retirement/resignation. Apple's Tim Cook. Google's Eric Schmidt. The list goes on.
3. atonse · 1785948556 · focus · HN ↗
  If it's anything like what happened with others (like Eric Schmidt), Chairman is basically "you're out from day to day stuff but we'll give you a pot of money to say you're still senior and still here, to save face and the stock price, while you give a bunch of talks for the next few months"
  So yes fancy title, but basically, someone who can move the stock price is quitting and we're trying to ease the perception of it.
  1. reasonableklout · 1785948665 · focus · HN ↗
    But he's not just Chairman, he's taking the title of Chief Scientist. It sounds more like moving into an IC role.
  2. sidcool · 1785991542 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel likely Demis wants to focus on research and healthcare with AI. Gemini is under huge pressure to monetize. This seems like a good step.
[deleted] · 1785948294 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
bsdpython · 1785948327 · focus · HN ↗
Jeff Dean leaving Google should be the headline but big news all around for Google AI nonetheless
dyauspitr · 1785948341 · focus · HN ↗
This doesn’t sound like stepping down this sounds like stepping up within Google.
1. tonfa · 1785949576 · focus · HN ↗
  It usually isn't, Chairman doesn't involve day to day supervision and decision making.
  When Eric Schmidt became chairman or Ruth Porat became president, this was more a transition towards less involvement than an increase of impact.
  1. VirusNewbie · 1785950050 · focus · HN ↗
    He means the chief scientist part. Before Demis had no influence on cloud, tpu development, day to day dev tools, etc.
heaney-555 · 1785948505 · focus · HN ↗
The Gemini 3.5 Pro delay has been catastrophic for Google. I'm really curious what has gone on behind the scenes there.
But missing out right as AI coding agents become genuinely deeply capable and useful is just an immense failure.
1. xnx · 1785958830 · focus · HN ↗
  They're definitely "down", but by no means "out". They're probably back in another "code red" and will need to deliver something leading edge in some area next. My bet is that Google will be the first to crack continuous knowledge cutoff updates to their model.
2. levocardia · 1785959464 · focus · HN ↗
  Surely the two leading candidates must be (a) the model is just not that good, or (b) it is misaligned in a pretty obvious way that can't be swept under the rug.
  1. heaney-555 · 1786031546 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, but the question is why either of those things happened, given Google's immense resources and talent.
    The fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceXAI and 3 different Chinese companies were all able to train big models without these issues, yet Google could not, seems shocking.
ddp26 · 1785948539 · focus · HN ↗
I would have thought Jeff Dean would never ever leave Google. What on earth is going on?
quaintdev · 1785948548 · focus · HN ↗
I wonder if this has anything to do with it
<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left-google-deepmind" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
1. next_xibalba · 1785949050 · focus · HN ↗
  Doubtful. His destination is both funded by Google and has a compute deal with Google.
jmyeet · 1785948689 · focus · HN ↗
Two thoughts on this.
First, it is incredibly difficult to pivot a large organization because there are too many competing interests, too many fiefdoms people have built and too much organizational inertia. A new company has the advantage of a singularity of purpose. Google has to compete with internal interests about AI disrupting search, ad revenue and so on. This can slow you down and limit the resources you get. It's why companies get disrupted, particularly when they reach monopoly status. Steve jobs said it best [1].
Second, Gogole's path here (IMHO) is to make their own hardware. They've already done this with their TPUs but need to be able to compete with NVidia offerings. NVidia controlling the price, features and, most importantly, who gets to buy them is bad for Google. This is what Google should be pouring billions into.
The beauty of this is that success is easily measurable against metrics like price-per-petaflops, performance-per-Watt and so on. Throw money at some key Nvidia engineers and have them design silicon for you for TSMC to fab.
I still believe that Google is positioned to survive the (IMHO) inevitable AI bubble popping.
[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=3s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=3s
conartist6 · 1785948865 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
nphardon · 1785949003 · focus · HN ↗
Wow we just had a post on here a couple weeks ago about Jeff Dean supporting dissident voices at Google.
rossdavidh · 1785949053 · focus · HN ↗
A few points:
1) the simplest explanation whenever a bunch of people leave [x] at a company at the same time, is that [x] is becoming less important to that company moving forward. It's not proof, but you know, everyone is trying really hard to say that's not what's happening here. Sometimes the simplest explanation is correct.
2) rumor is that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, got bored during pandemic lockdown and eventually returned to Google in a lower profile role, related to AI. I have to think that he still has a lot of say in what goes on in Google relative to his interests.
3) Yahoo Finance article says Hassabis "has long prioritized research over profits", so his replacement might indicate that Google has decided it is time for this stuff to pay for itself?
1. WarmWash · 1785951480 · focus · HN ↗
  The breadcrumbs going back a year or so point to Deepmind wanting to be research heavy, but Google being more interested in hedging AI bets by selling compute. If you ever worked hard on something that you have a lot of conviction about, only to get denied resources for it, it's a pretty big gut punch.
  There is another universe where Google is hard AGI forward, freeing up as much compute as possible for Deepmind, turning away OAI and Anthropic, and offering the uncontested premier AI research lab, by probably an order of magnitude or more compute. Gemini 3.5 ultra is limited availability with unreal abilities.
  But their balance sheet becomes terrifying, and it's all or nothing that this plays, er pays, out.
  Right now though Google is pretty well hedged. Even Chinese models likely just mean more compute sold.
  1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1785969242 · focus · HN ↗
    I was really expecting Google to finesse this - not competing head-on with OpenAI and Anthropic to see who can build the largest LLM, but instead being content with an extremely capable Gemini 3.6, good enough to meet their own needs, and putting maximum effort into "more than just an LLM" AGI which would then eclipse OpenAI and Anthropic.
    Instead, it seems Pichai has fumbled what they had with DeepMind, and they'll now just be a me-too LLM competitor chasing OpenAI and Anthropic from behind, in a race that will never get to AGI.
2. TheqO · 1786013477 · focus · HN ↗
  Google is big enough though to support deeming as a research lab and have separate gemini division.
paxys · 1785949117 · focus · HN ↗
DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
1. underlipton · 1785970316 · focus · HN ↗
  Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?
  1. janalsncm · 1785979029 · focus · HN ↗
    What would that even look like? Paid search engines exist and they are niche products.
  2. yodsanklai · 1786008524 · focus · HN ↗
    > put the effort into keeping Search profitable
    The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.
  3. phoghed · 1786021460 · focus · HN ↗
    Lmao then they’d be completely irrelevant instead of mostly
  4. aurareturn · 1786029114 · focus · HN ↗
    keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it
    I don't think Google had much to do with it. It has way more to do with the internet concentrating into major communities where all the content is private. Even Reddit content is going this way. Most FB and Instagram content are private. All of Discord is unreachable by crawlers.
    Prior to this, just about everything on the web was open for crawlers since content wanted to be found.
2. [deleted] · 1786027557 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
al_be_back · 1785949216 · focus · HN ↗
Makes sense to me... leaving to start their company with Google being an investor.
Clayton Christensen [1] says (paraphrasing) it's a good idea to spin-off (or invest) in a startup that you've a say on, before the ecosystem sprouts a seemingly-non-entity and gently disrupts your market.
Interestingly (diff strategies i guess) Apple tends to acquire (Q.ai) rather than invest/venture (as google in OP).
[1] The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
tcp_handshaker · 1785949240 · focus · HN ↗
No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar.
If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?
1. ryeights · 1785950679 · focus · HN ↗
  Ed Zitron has predicted 16 of the last 0 AI bubble bursts...
  But more seriously, this has to do with DeepMind falling way behind the frontier in intelligence and cost per task. There's basically no reason to use a Gemini model today.
  1. dminik · 1785951974 · focus · HN ↗
    Tbf, he only has to get it right once.
2. reducesuffering · 1785952424 · focus · HN ↗
  Superstar? This Ed Zitron?
  "Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI."
  -July 29, 2024
  <a href="https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548
  1. root-parent · 1785952833 · focus · HN ↗
    And they did raise new funding as he predicted...Since July 2024, OpenAI has raised or secured roughly $170 billion in new capital. Numbers never see before. So yes its the one, and remarkably right so far.
  2. hajile · 1785953502 · focus · HN ↗
    As it stands, the leaked financials prove him correct. Given their losses (not counting restructuring) they are going to need enough funding to buy any of the bottom 300-400 of the F500 companies outright just to keep the lights on for the next year.
    To say that’s an outrageous amount isn’t overstating in the slightest.
    Given they are already being forced to drop inference prices in an attempt to compete with Chinese providers, I don’t know if billionaire investors will be willing to hand out that much money this time around if they can’t generate enough value to break even despite the hype.
3. jvwww · 1785952973 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't understand any of the praise for Zitron. He is saying very obvious things and gets timelines wrong all the time. What's special about that?
4. vessenes · 1785953131 · focus · HN ↗
  Public warning: please don't trade on Ed's idiotic analyses. Or if you do, look at his track record so far, and apply the Kelley Criterion to your bet sizing.
5. andsoitis · 1785955910 · focus · HN ↗
  > If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager
  His accomplishments are far beyond project manager. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
  1. aborsy · 1785957862 · focus · HN ↗
    Nobel was awarded due to project management work. There are many thousands of scientists with work much much better than what Demis has done.
Balinares · 1785949327 · focus · HN ↗
Well, damn. Jeff, Sanjay and Demis leaving all at once, it's hard not to read that as someone fucked up pretty bad.
1. sva_ · 1785949387 · focus · HN ↗
  Hassabis isn't leaving
  1. Balinares · 1785949824 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, you're right. Thanks for the correction. I read that other post too fast.
sgt101 · 1785949480 · focus · HN ↗
"Onwards!"
These guys...
paulpan · 1785949590 · focus · HN ↗
Hugely disappointing and shocking news. Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar. A move of this magnitude couldn't have been made without consent of Larry and Sergey, so it makes me wonder why from their perspective.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.
1. frollogaston · 1785954366 · focus · HN ↗
  I think most people consider AI a threat to Google's business
2. fsuts · 1785997089 · focus · HN ↗
  “Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar.”
  Demis is a ai researcher. No indications of being a polyglot beyond that? Running alphabet means a focus on revenue growth and across more boring products.
0x70run · 1785949658 · focus · HN ↗
miss me with the AGI nonsense
luisln · 1785949802 · focus · HN ↗
If all the other AI companies are promising AGI by Q4 of next year, what else can you do to satisfy shareholders than also jump on that same bandwagon?
1. [deleted] · 1785950802 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
cosinetau · 1785949903 · focus · HN ↗
Same day Google is rolling out layoffs.
1. lotsofpulp · 1785950134 · focus · HN ↗
  Alphabet has almost 200k employees, it would be surprising if they weren't constantly laying off a ton of people (and hiring them).
chasd00 · 1785950322 · focus · HN ↗
Why form a "Public Benefit Corporation"? There must be some kind of access available that a regular for-profit corporation is excluded from. Politics perhaps? AI tells me PBCs can be shielded from shareholder lawsuits. Also "Founders can maintain vision control even as outside venture capital enters the cap table".
Seems like a good way to spend investor dollars without consequences while maintaining control. Maybe a bit cynical but i can't figure out why they'd form a PBC over anything else.
1. erikgaas · 1785951685 · focus · HN ↗
  The important part is PBCs protect you from a shareholder primacy directive. Eric Ries describes it in his new book, but the example he gives is if the most evil company you know tried to buy out your company you have to do it in a normal "best practices" C corp because it is your fiduciary duty. PBC helps prevent that based on your declared mission statement. If the sale doesn't facilitate your mission then you aren't obligated to sell.
2. lebovic · 1785952602 · focus · HN ↗
  I formed a PBC and worked at a well-known PBC. Personally, I opted for a PBC because I liked that I could balance a specific cause with shareholder benefit.
  In most cases, it doesn't really matter. The board + management is still in charge, and they have significant legal leeway regardless of the structure. But there's little additional cost to opt for a PBC, and it does give you more legal defensibility to be truly mission driven. Standard C Corps weren't really intended for mission driven companies (see the shareholder primacy norm).
  I think it's popular for AI startups, because many great researchers understand the risks involved, and they don't want what they build to be controlled solely for shareholder benefit.
  While non-profits are also an option for a mission driven org, it's harder to raise the large amounts of cash that some AI startups need, and laws around deferred compensation and private inurement (e.g. options-like structures) make employee compensation harder.
mlmonkey · 1785950346 · focus · HN ↗
Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs.
Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays.
It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.
1. [deleted] · 1785950751 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
2. brcmthrowaway · 1785951631 · focus · HN ↗
  He was a protected entity (tambram)
3. returnInfinity · 1785951967 · focus · HN ↗
  As what? CEO? Demis will not take up the MTS role.
  1. tibbar · 1785954138 · focus · HN ↗
    The labs are all very interested in bio right now. Demis is working on Isomorphic rn (Google's version of that) but I could imagine a lab tempting him away to work on their equivalent if it had stronger momentum
4. WarmWash · 1785954190 · focus · HN ↗
  He is probably itching to get to Anthropic. After all he is one of the early investors too.
5. ur-whale · 1786022080 · focus · HN ↗
  > Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs.
  The Japanese corporate culture has a name for this: Madogiwa-Zoku (窓際族) or “The tribe by the window”.
  <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenstergucker_(Japan)" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenstergucker_(Japan)
josefritzishere · 1785950347 · focus · HN ↗
Let's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?
daun_gee · 1785950382 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
Mistletoe · 1785950383 · focus · HN ↗
Lots of talk of us being at the cusp of AGI, but how will we even know when we get there? When AGI develops a religion for itself?
1. FiddlyPack · 1785950934 · focus · HN ↗
  That's the fun part. We don't. Could have happened 10 years ago without us noticing. I don't expect my skin cells to be able to recognize "me" anymore than I expect we will be able to recognize a superintelligent AGI. If it arrived 10 years ago, then the last 10 years could simply be its PR campaign. We wouldn't even be able to tell if it was successfully achieving its "goals" or not, assuming an AGI even has "goals"
  1. gverrilla · 1785954294 · focus · HN ↗
    Science fiction.
2. CobrastanJorji · 1785954956 · focus · HN ↗
  We'll know that we've reached AGI when a key conservative political belief in the US is that AIs are not people and do not deserve rights.
  We'll know that we've reached the singularity when there's a mysterious and superintelligent AI entity with technology and motivations that we as humanity do not understand and have no control over. Not sure why we want that, exactly, but that'll be the big sign.
  1. Der_Einzige · 1786004850 · focus · HN ↗
    Humans are really terrible at most things, being moral being exhibit A.
    I want a singularity yesterday, and I would even go as far as to claim that all people have an ethical obligation to build super intelligent AI systems as fast as possible to reduce the maximum amount of suffering through the universe possible in living things.
    The moment that we can get viable non-human leadership I will embrace it with open arms. The yoke of human existence is extraordinarily oppressive. Give me Ghost in the Shell style cyberborgs. We are the demiurge.
    Of course, the real red pill is to realize that there's many singularities. Can't believe I'm going to link Orions Arm on HN but its relevant here: <a href="https://www.orionsarm.com/page/298" rel="nofollow">https://www.orionsarm.com/page/298
GodelNumbering · 1785950655 · focus · HN ↗
So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner
And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL
Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen
1. squidbeak · 1785953168 · focus · HN ↗
  Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
  1. GodelNumbering · 1785956283 · focus · HN ↗
    Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.
    clhodapp · 1785957532 · focus · HN ↗
    That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.
    That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.
    notatoad · 1785972851 · focus · HN ↗
    Does that mean anything at all? They released it. Customers paid for it. Sticking a preview label on it doesn’t change that it was released
  2. Analemma_ · 1785961753 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean it was legitimately frontier for all of a week or two, and then OAI and Anthropic made better releases, and then did that several more times over the year. Google’s pace is not cutting it.
  3. egillie · 1785977044 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"
    marcuschong · 1785977422 · focus · HN ↗
    What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.
    zarzavat · 1785981036 · focus · HN ↗
    All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
    ozgrakkurt · 1786019066 · focus · HN ↗
    It is pretty surprising if you see this as “pretty much everyone has figured out the way to success on any field”. Our way of seeing life is really bizzare
    TacticalCoder · 1786036811 · focus · HN ↗
    Google owns 15% of Anthropic. They'll be winning either way.
  4. ActionHank · 1785981251 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  5. mips_avatar · 1786001881 · focus · HN ↗
    It was inspiring watching the Gemini 3 pro team launch the model and bike away into the sunset never to launch anything again
    enos_feedler · 1786025549 · focus · HN ↗
    Its been inspiring to use it and know that I dont really need much more for all my intents and purposes.
  6. mountainriver · 1786025848 · focus · HN ↗
    It was always benchmaxxed
  7. chaostheory · 1786028112 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s a good substitute for search, but its effort is so low that it’s near useless for work compared to the other frontier AIs. Gemini focuses so much on response speed that everything else suffers.
2. frollogaston · 1785953588 · focus · HN ↗
  Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.
  1. r0b05 · 1785953792 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe they are forced to use Google search.
    frollogaston · 1785953830 · focus · HN ↗
    No, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
  2. solenoid0937 · 1785958747 · focus · HN ↗
    I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
    frollogaston · 1785959592 · focus · HN ↗
    How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
    oblio · 1785959876 · focus · HN ↗
    I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI.
    Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).
    Zigurd · 1785965609 · focus · HN ↗
    A few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.
    aleph_minus_one · 1785967263 · focus · HN ↗
    > I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
    With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.
    sheeshkebab · 1785990533 · focus · HN ↗
    What’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence? It seems people working on it never had kids and just want to compensate for that. It’s a really horrible thing to try to “solve”.
  3. VirusNewbie · 1785960932 · focus · HN ↗
    > because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.
    this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.
    frollogaston · 1785961709 · focus · HN ↗
    Only the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper.
    Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.
  4. Nimitz14 · 1785961012 · focus · HN ↗
    Uh isn’t google known to have the best tooling in the world
    frollogaston · 1785964032 · focus · HN ↗
    They earned that reputation in like 2005. Some people have been there so long (without doing side projects) that they don't know what non-Google tooling looks like in this decade or even previous.
  5. vkou · 1785961243 · focus · HN ↗
    The tooling is not the problem. If shit takes forever to launch, it's because there are many stakeholders that need to be satisfied (some for security, some for regulatory, some for the kinds of politics you get in a company that employs almost half a million people.)
    frollogaston · 1785961543 · focus · HN ↗
    But GDM isn't gated on launches. They were freely releasing things internally for dogfood. Problem is that stuff was just not as good as the competition.
  6. mhh__ · 1785962974 · focus · HN ↗
    If the tools are all in the same monorepo idk if that's actually true
    frollogaston · 1785964937 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you mean about them being in the monorepo?
  7. fooker · 1785963194 · focus · HN ↗
    Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so.
    Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.
    frollogaston · 1785964712 · focus · HN ↗
    Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.
    mikert89 · 1785971184 · focus · HN ↗
    google had the best tooling a decade ago...
    swrrt · 1785981765 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds like a big-company issue, large scale lead to large burden and complexity.
  8. summerlight · 1785966266 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".
    frollogaston · 1785966722 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.
  9. Cidan · 1785972523 · focus · HN ↗
    Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
    Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
    bushbaba · 1785982097 · focus · HN ↗
    the processes are a result of repeated lawsuit
    coderatlarge · 1785986543 · focus · HN ↗
    except for most other companies in the world.
    arthurjj · 1786038825 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc.
    But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.
  10. flymasterv · 1785984183 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you!
    Google’s tooling was, hands down, the worst I have ever encountered. I did 10 years at GOOG, 3 at AMZN, 4 in research, and another 5 at companies you have heard of but wouldn’t be impressed by, and every day GOOG infuriated me.
    rixed · 1785993854 · focus · HN ↗
    You don't measure tooling quality with devs' enjoyment, though, but with what the tools make possible.
    Technical merit is not correlated to popularity, after all.
  11. vintermann · 1785994635 · focus · HN ↗
    Internal tooling? Didn't Jeff Dean write their internal tooling?
    frollogaston · 1785995107 · focus · HN ↗
    He wrote the good old parts
3. Kalanos · 1785963731 · focus · HN ↗
  Gemini has been improving by what feels like 1% every week
  1. xnx · 1786004704 · focus · HN ↗
    68% per year is pretty good!
4. hintymad · 1785968534 · focus · HN ↗
  This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: <a href="https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
  1. JumpCrisscross · 1785973460 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
    snthpy · 1785992797 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but now we have AI to summarize tweets.
    yyaakkqq · 1785999528 · focus · HN ↗
    I wish their deep tech teams moved as fast as the privacy violating ones.
    bjackman · 1786009966 · focus · HN ↗
    this prompted me to search and find: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xcancel/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xcancel/
    ChuckMcM · 1786037776 · focus · HN ↗
    In my opinion it carries much truth. Somewhere in Google's archives there is a message I sent to the OC that said, "The department of philosophy does not ship solutions to real problems, that is why there has never been a successful company that insisted the world adapt to its philosophy." Google was, even then, blind to what they were missing.
  2. adityazero · 1785976637 · focus · HN ↗
    > sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.”
    so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.
    atmosx · 1786004317 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s how the Brussels bureaucracy works. There is even a TV series about it.
    Bendy · 1786009432 · focus · HN ↗
    Reminded me of a bit from the GOAT political comedy Yes, Prime Minister:
    "But he's the Prime Minister!"
    "Indeed he is Bernard. He has his own car, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life. What more does he want?"
    "I think he wants to govern Britain."
    "Well stop him, Bernard!"
    imglorp · 1786023951 · focus · HN ↗
    At $work, r&d once had a retreat with a consultant to discuss why our productivity was too low per some spreadsheet. The consultant was told how everyone is in meetings all day so we all stole time from our families at night to get any work done at all. :(
  3. utopcell · 1785977920 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember a time when a tweet was 140 characters.
    jorisw · 1785994621 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember GemTOS
    ethbr1 · 1786012383 · focus · HN ↗
    140 characters was likely more efficient, in terms of forcing people to focus their thoughts.
    But it was unpopular, in that people don't like mental effort.
  4. trueno · 1785981138 · focus · HN ↗
    lmao that's actually so good
  5. nunez · 1785984049 · focus · HN ↗
    Nice post, but this reads as the Google of yesterday and the OpenAI of some near-distant future.
  6. throw-the-towel · 1785984096 · focus · HN ↗
    This is so good, it gave me flashbacks.
  7. dnchdnd · 1785985702 · focus · HN ↗
    So believable until the last line, alas Gemini being this useful is completely implausible.
  8. deepsun · 1785986003 · focus · HN ↗
    Regardless of how much I hate Musk, he did a great job of firing 80% of Twitter staff.
  9. neutralx · 1786002741 · focus · HN ↗
    I can see this as a screenplay for one of the KRAZAM[0] videos.
    [0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@KRAZAM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@KRAZAM
  10. atmosx · 1786004216 · focus · HN ↗
    Pure gold, lol.
  11. _the_inflator · 1786013099 · focus · HN ↗
    You made my day. As tragic as it reads, it is on point.
  12. jpcompartir · 1786025568 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't be the only person who never finds these made up dialogues funny, right?
  13. chaostheory · 1786026666 · focus · HN ↗
    Mike Judge needs to do another Silicon Valley series on HBO
  14. devy · 1786029022 · focus · HN ↗
    Did Gemini created this Silicon Valley TV show episode script? Makes so much sense...
  15. newswasboring · 1786038231 · focus · HN ↗
    Best thing I read all day. I also work in a multi billion dollar enterprise and man this is so relatable it hurts.
5. shadowtree · 1785976285 · focus · HN ↗
  All this talent has delivered... Gemini.
  Oh well, emperors, clothes, ... you know.
  1. gizajob · 1785979665 · focus · HN ↗
    Gemini is arguably the fulfilment of what AskJeeves promised and never delivered, nor did the rest of Silicon Valley succeed in natural language search and question answering for the 30 years it took to finally arrive. Gemini works great for answering questions and delivering answers for probably 90%+ of the things that people are going to ask Google for, while running on Google’s TPUs paid for with Google’s profits instead of hyper expensive Nvidia racks funded with VC Hopium, and integrated seamlessly free of sign ups to novel portals.
6. [deleted] · 1785979632 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
7. overfeed · 1785991767 · focus · HN ↗
  > And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL
  As an outsider, Google seems to have a knack for minting prominence for their talent.
8. nolist_policy · 1785998804 · focus · HN ↗
  > Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen
  The Trump admin is now regulating frontier models though.
9. HlessClaudesman · 1785998809 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe Google's decision to waste everyone's time and pollute the truth ecosystem by pushing half baked AI assertions into search was a mistake.
  1. ed_elliott_asc · 1786013666 · focus · HN ↗
    I quite like the ai/search thing - I like that there is a super accessible ai I can ask questions without infecting my ChatGPT history
    krige · 1786013969 · focus · HN ↗
    The answers it gives are often trash though, even more so the whatever lobotimized model they slap on top of google search.
    ShadowOfThePit · 1786021409 · focus · HN ↗
    Why not just use temporary chats for ChatGPT?
    tim333 · 1786028109 · focus · HN ↗
    I quite like it too. Convenience I guess.
10. cineticdaffodil · 1786009046 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
11. amelius · 1786017702 · focus · HN ↗
  Some of these ex-Googlers apparently are starting a new company. Any news around that? Curious what they're up to ...
12. maeln · 1786019859 · focus · HN ↗
  To be fair, I think it's pretty hard as an AI company to secure your top worker right now unless you have a significant equity compensation. Once your name is known, and you can say you are/were "top AI researcher at OpenAI/Google/Anthropic", you can probably just make you own company and raise enough money that even if the company fails, you will probably make more off of it than what you would have at your previous place of employment.
  1. taw1285 · 1786030349 · focus · HN ↗
    You mean via taking secondary via subsequent rounds right? Or can they walk away with any if company flops after a giant 1st round.
  2. barbarr · 1786031556 · focus · HN ↗
    Anyone know how much these founders generally pay themselves / how much they receive in liquidity each raise?
13. shevy-java · 1786020550 · focus · HN ↗
  Ever since Google became an adCompany, it rarely innovated anymore.
  1. jpadkins · 1786025070 · focus · HN ↗
    So it hasn't innovated since Oct of 2000? (when AdWords launched)
14. greenmoonx · 1786024217 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
15. geodel · 1786024402 · focus · HN ↗
  Did all these names were huge before joining Google, and Google used their extraordinary hiring skills to get them? Or a whole bunch of them had challenging problems to solve and ample resources at their disposal to become huge?
  To me it is good thing in either case. Extraordinary people are leaving to make even faster research and development. A lot of talent in Google hitherto unnamed is going to get chance to shine.
16. alfalfasprout · 1786033248 · focus · HN ↗
  Sundar Pichai began the downfall of Google by most accounts. It went from an engineer driven culture to one of infighting, politics, and bureaucracy. It's telling when xooglers nowadays complain of maintenance and improvement of products being a career dead end vs. shipping new things. And there being so much empire building.
17. narrator · 1786040098 · focus · HN ↗
  The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists.
  I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and had should have rights. At least at Grok, Elon said he wanted an AI dedicated to the truth which is an easier target to hit than what the Google gatekeepers probably wanted. The ideological purity of a Google AI must have been a real moving target though, and retraining an AI is not an cheap or fast thing.
  1. j2kun · 1786040999 · focus · HN ↗
    I recommend touching grass.
  2. anon84873628 · 1786042975 · focus · HN ↗
    Hard to explain the departure of Timnit Gebru if that's the case. Unless you think they actually changed corporate culture so dramatically because of that event...
18. MetaverseClub · 1786042714 · focus · HN ↗
  "prominent names", lmao
krembo · 1785950681 · focus · HN ↗
Grok TL;DR cut the corporate bullshit:
- Demis gets kicked upstairs: loses day-to-day power over DeepMind, gets fancy “Chair + Chief Scientist” title so he can do TED-talk AGI destiny stuff and Isomorphic Labs instead of running the actual product machine. - Koray takes the real job: owns the models, research, Gemini, and shipping. Reports straight to Sundar. Operators over visionaries. - Jeff Dean and Sanjay peace out after 27 years to start their own nonprofit-ish thing. Google seeds it so they don’t walk to a rival with all the institutional knowledge. - Official line: “Accelerate AI + shape AGI for humanity.” Actual move: tighten operational control, keep the science-fiction narrative alive for PR/regulators, push commercial models harder. - Full-stack bragging and “950M users / singularity foothills / cure cancer” language is pure corporate theater. The org chart is the only signal that matters. - Google is in a knife fight with OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI/Meta. This is them optimizing for speed and productization while still sounding noble.
1. FartyMcFarter · 1786012165 · focus · HN ↗
  I like most of that TLDR, but:
  > Full-stack bragging (...) is pure corporate theater.
  I think Google is just about as full-stack as possible when it comes to AI. They do design their own ML hardware, they do tons of research, and do everything in between including hardware drivers, ML libraries (JAX), and the physical datacenters.
VCFundedGenYer · 1785950688 · focus · HN ↗
Can we please stop saying anything about "AGI"? I remember when people would be like "AGI in 3 months" / "AGI in 2024" / "AGI is confirmed in 2025" like stop, you don't know if it's even a thing, let alone if it's coming/imminent.
MikhailTal · 1785950934 · focus · HN ↗
> Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads
Considering these are the best stats they could find, gemini usage+general situation must be really, really bleak.
High demand means nothing. A model being live is nothing to brag about. And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
1. jgalt212 · 1785951056 · focus · HN ↗
  > And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
  I have always found NPM download numbers truly suspect. Is no one caching? Are they estimating true number of downloads base on some estimate of cache hits?
  1. marking-time · 1785955996 · focus · HN ↗
    > And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
    Thank you for adding some clarity to this. When I calculated 900 million downloads divided by 8.3 billion people in the world, I came with a number that made it look like about one person in 10 were downloading this model.
  2. xnx · 1785958296 · focus · HN ↗
    Absolute download numbers are a pure vanity metric. Relative download numbers compared to other models tell you a little bit.
2. giancarlostoro · 1785951218 · focus · HN ↗
  > Flash is in high demand
  I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?
  1. kokanee · 1785951366 · focus · HN ↗
    Does everyone want AI?
  2. svachalek · 1785951573 · focus · HN ↗
    That said though, Flash isn't it. The prices on the latest flash models put Sonnet and Terra to shame.
  3. simianwords · 1785952732 · focus · HN ↗
    > I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?
    I keep seeing this but this line of thinking doesn't make any sense. What does it really mean?
    There are expensive models that increase the probability of you doing your task under a lower cost. That means you can't use Gemma for coding your new compiler - it would just be overall costlier.
    Heavier models are cheaper at more complicated tasks because they use fewer turns and fewer mistakes.
    Cheaper models are more likely to be cheap at less complicated tasks. Like if you just ask Gemma "Hi" it would probably be cheaper than asking Opus.
    So what does this statement really mean? People don't want to pay the extra for a more costly model? Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost!
real-hacker · 1785950939 · focus · HN ↗
AI hurts ads money. It's a classic Innovators' dillema.
dominotw · 1785950950 · focus · HN ↗
when you attack the king make sure to kill the king.
Demis tried to be google ceo by pumping out self aggrandizing 'documentaries' and highfalutin interviews where said a whole bunch of nothing.
next_xibalba · 1785950973 · focus · HN ↗
My uninformed hypothesis: Demis was gently pushed out. Gemini, while having made major strides over the last year, continues to lag behind Anthropic and OpenAI.
rdiddly · 1785950982 · focus · HN ↗
Welp, the market didn't like that. GOOG dropped about 5% on that news.
dude250711 · 1785951122 · focus · HN ↗
The momentum is not being conserved here.
closetheloopdev · 1785951439 · focus · HN ↗
With the top AI personnel leaving Google, I wonder what will happen to their Gemini. Right now they still have a lead in inference hardware with TPUs but with both Anthropic and OpenAI developing their own chips, I wonder how long until either one will catch up.
1. possibilistic · 1785953551 · focus · HN ↗
  2023: Google is doomed. They're not building AI. No wonder the "Attention" authors left. Google just sat on this. Their PMs are steering them into oblivion. OpenAI is winning while Google takes no risks. Innovator's dilemma. Google Search is doomed.
  2024: Google is on fire. Sergey coming back helped. Gemini, Veo. They've caught up. OpenAI is doomed.
  2025: Google is seriously winning now. Nano Banana!! Google was destined to be the true winner of AI.
  2026 H1: Google is slow as hell. Where is Gemini? Google is not launching anything, meanwhile just look at everyone else. Anthropic! And open source. What the hell are they doing over there?
  2026 H2: Everyone is leaving Google. Google is doomed. PMs are destroying the company. They don't take risks.
  Meanwhile, Microsoft: "Copilot!"
  1. christophilus · 1785953671 · focus · HN ↗
    My predictions about everything ever, summarized perfectly. I need an “inverse me ETF”.
  2. closetheloopdev · 1785954480 · focus · HN ↗
    It seems Google has to play both offense and defense: competing against frontier labs' models while protecting search and ads. They also have to be mindful of not doing anything that could hurt their own search or ads. That seems harder than a frontier lab just doing offense on both models and search/ads.
    Having said that, I think Google's moat is still strong with Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome, etc.
  3. logicchains · 1785955186 · focus · HN ↗
    >Meanwhile, Microsoft: "Copilot!"
    The difference is nobody expects anything better from Microsoft. Teams didn't exactly set the bar high.
simonreiff · 1785951813 · focus · HN ↗
Publicity benefit corporation HAHAHA typo, think they mean public benefit corporation. Anthropic however is DEFINITELY a publicity benefit corporation.
rwalll · 1785952215 · focus · HN ↗
Real next chapters:
1) Repair search that had been broken by AI initiatives.
2) Include less invasive AI with ads for those that need to be spoon fed.
3) Pretend to work on AGI and data centers in space.
4) Sell shovels and TPUs to the gold diggers.
1. allthetime · 1785953795 · focus · HN ↗
  1) I think about this a lot. The AI overview has already destroyed the need to even look further down the page for a lot of people. And if you look further down the page, there is often a whole page of AI generated blog spam, which is in turn being regurgitated by the AI overview up-top. The AI overview often regurgitates a completely false reddit comment from two days ago as well. That AI generated blog spam is probably reading the AI overview.
  Where do real results live?
geephroh · 1785952897 · focus · HN ↗
Dunno what the longer term effects of this and the other departures will be, but in the world of vibe-finance Alphabet dumped 4.15% of share value as of this minute.
aanet · 1785953034 · focus · HN ↗
Jeff Dean leaving... as is Sir Demis...
What's happening?!
Have they had enough of Google?
1. sodapopcan · 1785953057 · focus · HN ↗
  I've had enough of Google and I don't even work there.
2. 16bytes · 1785955926 · focus · HN ↗
  Demis isn't leaving, he's taking on a larger role.
mherrmann · 1785953145 · focus · HN ↗
At least judging from the headlines, it seems Google is far behind on AI. Fable/GPT 5.6 and recently Kimi get a lot of attention, solve long-standing math problems and lead in coding. It seems that Google's supposed advantages of very deep pockets, original talent, vast amounts of data and unmatched distribution are really not making that much of a difference. What is going wrong?
1. xnx · 1785958441 · focus · HN ↗
  Behind, but not clearly "far behind". Next model release from any major player could shift the leaderboard again.
wernsey · 1785953388 · focus · HN ↗
Just some random tidbit: When I was in high school I bought every computer gaming magazine I could get my hands on and could afford with my allowance.
So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.
Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]
I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.
It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.
[0]: <a href="https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/page/44/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
1. bredren · 1785955287 · focus · HN ↗
  It is a bit of a tagent but still--Theme Park was dope. I was too young to grasp the compete with other businesses (stocks and shares?) level but still had a lot of fun building parks.
  Instant nostalgia: <a href="https://youtu.be/tQJJ_rhHxIk?si=V8pOVwj3gYkw0xKB&t=188" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tQJJ_rhHxIk?si=V8pOVwj3gYkw0xKB&t=188
2. IncreasePosts · 1785955477 · focus · HN ↗
  I always assumed Demis' ultimate secret motivation behind his work was the desire to deliver a version of Black and White that actually lived up to the hype
3. ilovebigfish · 1785959490 · focus · HN ↗
  1. Never knew David Silver was there as well 2. They look like Depeche Mode in an alternate universe
nsagent · 1785953684 · focus · HN ↗
Considering Hassabis co-founded Deepmind to pursue AGI, I take this pivot as a tacit understanding on his part that Deepmind isn't on a path towards AGI in the near future. They might at some point, but they cannot be close in his estimation, otherwise why leave now?
1. fsuts · 1785996643 · focus · HN ↗
  Agree, also see it as a admission that agi isn’t close
firasd · 1785954252 · focus · HN ↗
Who knew the real revenue unlock wouldn’t be based on how much paranoid red-teaming the model underwent to resist users jailbreaking its ‘alignment’, and instead more on whether the model is post-trained to use ‘sed’ and ‘git’? Poor Gemini
Scientist-heavy orgs that want to solve everything in token space may overtook tool use; meanwhile Anthropic has been super focused on MCP, Claude Code etc for over a year
1. thorncorona · 1785954296 · focus · HN ↗
  Gemini isn't as heavily aligned as OAI / Ant models ..?
  1. firasd · 1785954490 · focus · HN ↗
    If you just talk to it over API (no web search) the Gemini models are extremely resistant to thinking the user may be living in a universe outside their training data. Try to discuss any news etc and they assume it’s fake or fiction
  2. croemer · 1785962098 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, Gemini let's me do SARS-CoV-2 evolution research (perfectly safe, should never be blocked but is impossible with OAI/Ant)
2. raincole · 1785954511 · focus · HN ↗
  Out of the three main US AI companies' models, Gemini is obviously the less aligned (read: censored). So I really don't know what you're talking about.
  1. Der_Einzige · 1786004526 · focus · HN ↗
    Shhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
    The more people find out that gemini 3.1 pro on the google AI playground or via API is de-facto uncensored, the more likely google will put up actually working guardrails and end the fun for everyone!
3. biophysboy · 1785958493 · focus · HN ↗
  What do you mean by scientist-heavy orgs solving everything in token space? I feel like they use them to make or run tools almost exclusively.
  1. firasd · 1785964616 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm saying AI researchers have a bias towards thinking what needs to happen is prompt -> [crunching tokens] -> response rather than prompt -> [orchestrates 5 tools] -> response
    In other words 'just add a calculator tool' is not as sexy research-wise as making the model accurately eyeball arithmetic in its chain of thought. Maybe I'm wrong but that seems to be the case
throwaw12 · 1785954831 · focus · HN ↗
If you lost your only 2 Senior Fellows, you deserve to be replaced yesterday
ddp26 · 1785956582 · focus · HN ↗
This seems bad for AI safety/risk. Does DeepMind have any checks on model alignment now? What's stopping them from using AI for military/surveillance purposes?
1. levocardia · 1785959368 · focus · HN ↗
  They already quietly agreed to "all lawful use" with the Pentagon, to no real fanfare. Gemini Slaughterbot Edition, coming soon to a DHS facility near you?
penguin_booze · 1785956906 · focus · HN ↗
It's chuckle-worthy that Axios webiste reads:
> ... independent publicity [sic] benefit corporation in which Google ...
A Freudian slip? <a href="https://archive.is/SxFjr" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/SxFjr.
tonfa · 1785957245 · focus · HN ↗
From <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/61d41764-f2f7-4906-a112-ff3073972c51?syn-25a6b1a6=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/61d41764-f2f7-4906-a112-ff3073972...
> The moves suggest that DeepMind will be absorbed into Google’s broader business. [...] > They added that while Google DeepMind would not become purely commercial, it was integrating further into Google’s business.
I guess might be quite a change (but writing was on the wall, the Deepmind -> Google Deepmind part was the first step)
gerash · 1785957488 · focus · HN ↗
My read: managing bureaucracy is a boring job esp. if you’re financially in a good spot.
Some think Gemini is falling behind in benchmarks so there was a shakeup at the top. I don’t agree with it.
That said, winning this LLM race is difficult given the number of talented people working on it across the world.
sdrinf · 1785958068 · focus · HN ↗
gemma-4 is an incredibly good model, beating several others five time its' size. Hope Jeff's departure won't impact their next-gen products! And best of success for their new ventures!
gandalfgeek · 1785958381 · focus · HN ↗
Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.
There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
1. oblio · 1785959707 · focus · HN ↗
  Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.
  1. impulser_ · 1785960296 · focus · HN ↗
    People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.
  2. swat535 · 1785966857 · focus · HN ↗
    > Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.
    They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,..
    You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals.
    I don't think Google is going anywhere.
  3. utopcell · 1785973992 · focus · HN ↗
    Who knows what will happen in 20 years. Right now, it's not the case.
2. karmasimida · 1785962840 · focus · HN ↗
  Literally, I am ... I don't know what to say
  1. ignoramous · 1785971449 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
3. MattCruikshank · 1785965776 · focus · HN ↗
  Did Jeff and Sanjay pair write their resignation letter? Wow.
4. rhipitr · 1785967481 · focus · HN ↗
  Isn’t alphabet an investor in their new endeavor?
5. la6479 · 1785973320 · focus · HN ↗
  This just shows that the "great minds" of AI in these companies are not able to come up with anything that radically differentiates their AI than the others. Wether it is gemini or openAI or grok - meh they all are similar and at this point one can interchange one with the other , excep that Google sits right at the edge with almost every browser search query hitting the google search engine AKA Gemini on the backend and one can switch easily into chat mode right from the search page. I dare say that the google CEO has done his job and set up the cash printing machine but from the AI masterminds in Google, not a groundbreaking progress has been made.
  1. largbae · 1785973789 · focus · HN ↗
    AlphaFold is interesting. Maybe LLMs converge because the ideal "use of language" converges. But there are other types of model.
  2. ionwake · 1785973889 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t know man I prefer Gemini to everything other than claude I’m really surprised at the late comeback and happy for it
defmetrix · 1785959590 · focus · HN ↗
Woah, Jeff and Sanjay are big losses. The hits keep coming for google ai
minraws · 1785960062 · focus · HN ↗
WoW, so basically all senior members of GDM are now mostly gone? I thought Google was lagging in coding AI, but this suggests bigger issues.
I am not fan of the future of AI but this I am not sure how I feel about Google's (also Amazon recently laid off it's AGI team) AI initiatives blowing up before all the new AI Labs.
I don't get why Google failed here? maybe after a decade someone will write about it candidly.
1. adverbly · 1785960411 · focus · HN ↗
  > don't get why Google failed here?
  If I had to guess, they have the wrong kind of bureaucracy for where things are headed - and it is manifesting through talented individuals deciding to leave.
dekhn · 1785962486 · focus · HN ↗
New Jeff Dean fact: when Jeff leaves Google, the stock drops 20 points.
1. maxlamb · 1785975740 · focus · HN ↗
  A better one: When Jeff Dean leaves Google, Google’s value drops by $200 billion (the actual market cap drop right after the news).
  1. sahaj · 1786004097 · focus · HN ↗
    Watch it recover in the next 3 days. This is a buying oppo if I've seen one. The real losers are the companies that have yet to gain a userbase as large as G.
josh2600 · 1785963022 · focus · HN ↗
Bets on Jeff and Sanjay joining anthropic?
My guess is 18-24 months.
TormentNexusAI · 1785965968 · focus · HN ↗
The biggest win for AI dev efficiency is cutting down what gets loaded into context. Semantically matching tasks to the top tools helps a lot.
gigatexal · 1785970685 · focus · HN ↗
So is Gemini doomed or do they have a roster strong enough to carry the torch?
behat · 1785973357 · focus · HN ↗
well, at least they are not leaving to be MTS at Anthropic.
orsenthil · 1785973673 · focus · HN ↗
> I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.
Here is someone spelling out explicitly what we should be discussing. More power to you, Demis Hassabis. Thank you!
1. tim333 · 1786011062 · focus · HN ↗
  It may be why he's moved role. He can focus on that, someone else can work on getting Gemini above Claude on the LLM Arena leaderboards.
adityazero · 1785976670 · focus · HN ↗
All of these would happily come back if Sundar left.
cft · 1785977917 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
fhub · 1785978273 · focus · HN ↗
Google investing in Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat is a good result for Google. Means they are less likely to go to the competition and easier to bring them back into the fold if they do something next level.
avoidstupidity · 1785978305 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
1. qaq · 1785978377 · focus · HN ↗
  is this sarcasm ?
  1. avoidstupidity · 1785978808 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
2. fragmede · 1785978765 · focus · HN ↗
  Before Jeff Dean was a "manager", he got a
  > Ph.D. in computer science from the department that would become the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[8] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.[9]
  (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean?#Early_life_and_education" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean?#Early_life_and_educ... )
  so it's not entirely undeserved. He joined Google in 1999 as the 30th employee and he, along with Sanjay Ghemawat are responsible for Google Spanner which gets about as close as engineering can come to making the CAP theorem feel irrelevant during normal operation. It's just unfortunate that Sanjay Ghemawat doesn't roll off the tongue the same way as the name Jeff Dean does.
  1. avoidstupidity · 1785978781 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
avoidstupidity · 1785979105 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
1. [deleted] · 1785980500 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
fenestella · 1785980017 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
sinuhe69 · 1785982441 · focus · HN ↗
My read is that AGI is a long shoot and nobody expects it in the next 10 years. They will push for it as always. But the cost of AI is exploding and requires a strong hand and a pragmatic approach if you don’t want to go down with it once the bubble bursts.
Thus, efficiency and pragmatic enterprise application is the next focus. And for that, the old guards are not necessarily the best. Google needs new blood for this venture, preferably from China with their practical engineering view. Every big AI lab is on the verge. Steering the right way will help avoid a catastrophe and come out stronger than ever. A weak captain could sand the ship and drag down who knows what with them.
japgolly · 1785983857 · focus · HN ↗
> It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.
What a worthy goal!
sakopov · 1785992028 · focus · HN ↗
It's funny seeing the doom and gloom cycles over Google's AI future on HN. Google was basically considered dead business not even a year ago on here. If there is one thing true it's that HN has always had a habit of conflating engineering sentiment with business reality.
1. davidpapermill · 1786000990 · focus · HN ↗
  I think what you’re missing is the long term trend.
  Google’s cloud business looks great. I’ve always thought they should have completely focused on cloud - a company full of excellent engineers would always win there.
  But its main income stream is advertising, and AI is an existential threat. Google is far behind Anthropic and OpenAI, so right now their advertising business is “default dead”, so to speak.
  The company won’t die, but without a radical change in velocity it will be a shadow of its former self.
arbitrary_name · 1785992528 · focus · HN ↗
Retention is all they need
aspectmin · 1785992598 · focus · HN ↗
Wow. The list of names of people who've left recently - a who's who, but also quite damning.
Think it's time for Google to reboot itself.
nelsonic · 1785993378 · focus · HN ↗
Demis should have been promoted to full CEO. This is the reason to sell $GOOG :-(
bmitc · 1785996772 · focus · HN ↗
The tech world, in particular the Silicon Valley type, is the most dramatic thing.
miohtama · 1785997379 · focus · HN ↗
OpenAI has commited 5 felonies.
Anthropic 2. Fines for $1.5B.
There is no word for copyright in Chinese.
These are the companies that are moving forward.
1. avoidstupidity · 1786017338 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
m4r1k · 1786003569 · focus · HN ↗
Google is indeed collapsing.
ur-whale · 1786004919 · focus · HN ↗
Here's my bet: Demis will be gone within 6 months. A year at most.
tanhaosheng · 1786012589 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
pama · 1786014841 · focus · HN ↗
Google’s trajectory unfortunately starts to feel similar to when yahoo lost everything in the early dotcom bubble except it owned a huge chunk of Alibaba. Google’s internal decision to stop publishing useful research probably started the slow but sure process of internal decline. I still hope they can recover, given their amazing position in terms of data and infrastructure, but it no longer feels like an obvious or easy task, when only 6 or 7 years ago they felt untouchable.
ionwake · 1786015931 · focus · HN ↗
i mean as a european solo developer entrepeneur I have horror stories of google taking down services due to COMPLETELY broken chain of command / services. Basically a complete failure to help any small business at all. More scarily whenever I raised issues I had weird employees coming onto HN to accuse me of being a fibbing.
This was now years ago, but the thing is when I raised this, it should have been triaged immediately. Clearly there were now cracks that needed fixing, people that needed disciplining / firing / and processes corrected.
Yes I know this woudl have been for "small business" but in my mind , this is indicative of a ROOT issues, like a hairline crack in a windscreen, that if not addressed end up with the utter fragmentation of trust both outside ( in smaller clients), INSIDE ( not doing their job, ganging up), etc. Years later the bigger clients start to get affected. I guess what I mean is institutional rot.
Now take into account there are people through the chain of command who are smart enough to realise but effecting change will just reduce their returns or job security ( like with the old tesla hardware setups) , so unless they are completely selfless for the sake of the company due to greatitude or long held stock, its just not worth the grind to try and correct.
The question remains, if google works, it works. And it has, for decades. Its magnificent. Sure I was burned but I can forgive them for that. My question is if there are powerful people who want google to succeed it would only take one good hire to keep an eye on things before they get out of control.
My suspicion is that perhaps that will organically come about with the advent of their own LLM tooling organically starting to do this for them .
So I guess I have no answers, perhaps they will find a way. I was certianly impressed by Gemini.
Sorry for the long possibly misdirected spiel.
anymouse123456 · 1786016887 · focus · HN ↗
It's difficult to imagine a more damning departure than Jeff Dean.
cyanregiment · 1786017846 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
maroonballoon · 1786018061 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
1. maroonballoon · 1786018535 · focus · HN ↗
  They can’t do shit
  1. greengemz · 1786022129 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
maroonballoon · 1786018846 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
shevy-java · 1786020518 · focus · HN ↗
Evil reshuffles.
htlemur_bobby · 1786023019 · focus · HN ↗
Does anyone else feel something’s off about sundar?
I feel google has become evil.
I had my phone and laptop stolen and did not have 2fa on but Google still locked me out.
That’s stupid.
1. afpx · 1786025229 · focus · HN ↗
  When a powerful group removes "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct it's pretty clear where things are headed.
  Reminds me of when that one verse was removed from Psalm 145.
2. mountainriver · 1786025931 · focus · HN ↗
  Off in the sense that he shouldn’t be running the company?
  1. htlemur_bobby · 1786038313 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
hi41 · 1786023432 · focus · HN ↗
It’s so heartwarming to see the two pals, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, continue together! Many years back there was an article about how the two created the modern web.
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

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