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

818 points · 871 comments · colesantiago

  1. atleastoptimal · · 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. onlyrealcuzzo · · 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 · · 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.
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