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. 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.

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