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. 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. 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.

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