Thread

1. 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;inside-google&#x2F;message-ceo&#x2F;next-chapter-ai-momentum&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;inside-google&#x2F;message-ceo&#x2F;n...

   6. uejfiweun · 1785992766 · focus · HN ↗

      I think Google realized that it&#x27;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.

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