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

810 points · 862 comments · colesantiago

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. 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.

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