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

810 points · 862 comments · colesantiago

  1. paxys · · focus · HN ↗
    DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
    1. underlipton · · focus · HN ↗
      Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?
      1. janalsncm · · focus · HN ↗
        What would that even look like? Paid search engines exist and they are niche products.
      2. yodsanklai · · focus · HN ↗
        > put the effort into keeping Search profitable

        The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.

      3. phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
        Lmao then they’d be completely irrelevant instead of mostly
      4. aurareturn · · focus · HN ↗

          keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it
        I don't think Google had much to do with it. It has way more to do with the internet concentrating into major communities where all the content is private. Even Reddit content is going this way. Most FB and Instagram content are private. All of Discord is unreachable by crawlers.

        Prior to this, just about everything on the web was open for crawlers since content wanted to be found.

    2. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

      [deleted]

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