Thread

1. GodelNumbering · 1785950655 · focus · HN ↗

   So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner

   And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL

   Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen

   1. squidbeak · 1785953168 · focus · HN ↗

      Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.

      1. GodelNumbering · 1785956283 · focus · HN ↗

         Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.

         1. clhodapp · 1785957532 · focus · HN ↗

            That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.

            That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.

         2. notatoad · 1785972851 · focus · HN ↗

            Does that mean anything at all? They released it. Customers paid for it. Sticking a preview label on it doesn’t change that it was released
      2. Analemma_ · 1785961753 · focus · HN ↗

         I mean it was legitimately frontier for all of a week or two, and then OAI and Anthropic made better releases, and then did that several more times over the year. Google’s pace is not cutting it.
      3. egillie · 1785977044 · focus · HN ↗

         I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"

         1. marcuschong · 1785977422 · focus · HN ↗

            What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.
         2. zarzavat · 1785981036 · focus · HN ↗

            All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
         3. ozgrakkurt · 1786019066 · focus · HN ↗

            It is pretty surprising if you see this as “pretty much everyone has figured out the way to success on any field”. Our way of seeing life is really bizzare
         4. TacticalCoder · 1786036811 · focus · HN ↗

            Google owns 15% of Anthropic. They'll be winning either way.
      4. ActionHank · 1785981251 · focus · HN ↗

         [dead]

      5. mips_avatar · 1786001881 · focus · HN ↗

         It was inspiring watching the Gemini 3 pro team launch the model and bike away into the sunset never to launch anything again

         1. enos_feedler · 1786025549 · focus · HN ↗

            Its been inspiring to use it and know that I dont really need much more for all my intents and purposes.
      6. mountainriver · 1786025848 · focus · HN ↗

         It was always benchmaxxed
      7. chaostheory · 1786028112 · focus · HN ↗

         It’s a good substitute for search, but its effort is so low that it’s near useless for work compared to the other frontier AIs. Gemini focuses so much on response speed that everything else suffers.
   2. frollogaston · 1785953588 · focus · HN ↗

      Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

      1. r0b05 · 1785953792 · focus · HN ↗

         Maybe they are forced to use Google search.

         1. frollogaston · 1785953830 · focus · HN ↗

            No, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
      2. solenoid0937 · 1785958747 · focus · HN ↗

         I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.

         1. frollogaston · 1785959592 · focus · HN ↗

            How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
         2. oblio · 1785959876 · focus · HN ↗

            I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI.

            Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).

         3. Zigurd · 1785965609 · focus · HN ↗

            A few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.
         4. aleph_minus_one · 1785967263 · focus · HN ↗

            > I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.

            With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.

         5. sheeshkebab · 1785990533 · focus · HN ↗

            What’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence? It seems people working on it never had kids and just want to compensate for that. It’s a really horrible thing to try to “solve”.
      3. VirusNewbie · 1785960932 · focus · HN ↗

         > because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

         this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.

         1. frollogaston · 1785961709 · focus · HN ↗

            Only the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper.

            Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.

      4. Nimitz14 · 1785961012 · focus · HN ↗

         Uh isn’t google known to have the best tooling in the world

         1. frollogaston · 1785964032 · focus · HN ↗

            They earned that reputation in like 2005. Some people have been there so long (without doing side projects) that they don't know what non-Google tooling looks like in this decade or even previous.
      5. vkou · 1785961243 · focus · HN ↗

         The tooling is not the problem. If shit takes forever to launch, it's because there are many stakeholders that need to be satisfied (some for security, some for regulatory, some for the kinds of politics you get in a company that employs almost half a million people.)

         1. frollogaston · 1785961543 · focus · HN ↗

            But GDM isn't gated on launches. They were freely releasing things internally for dogfood. Problem is that stuff was just not as good as the competition.
      6. mhh__ · 1785962974 · focus · HN ↗

         If the tools are all in the same monorepo idk if that's actually true

         1. frollogaston · 1785964937 · focus · HN ↗

            What do you mean about them being in the monorepo?
      7. fooker · 1785963194 · focus · HN ↗

         Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so.

         Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.

         1. frollogaston · 1785964712 · focus · HN ↗

            Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.
         2. mikert89 · 1785971184 · focus · HN ↗

            google had the best tooling a decade ago...
         3. swrrt · 1785981765 · focus · HN ↗

            Sounds like a big-company issue, large scale lead to large burden and complexity.
      8. summerlight · 1785966266 · focus · HN ↗

         It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".

         1. frollogaston · 1785966722 · focus · HN ↗

            I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.
      9. Cidan · 1785972523 · focus · HN ↗

         Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

         Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

         1. bushbaba · 1785982097 · focus · HN ↗

            the processes are a result of repeated lawsuit
         2. coderatlarge · 1785986543 · focus · HN ↗

            except for most other companies in the world.
         3. arthurjj · 1786038825 · focus · HN ↗

            I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc.

            But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

            1. frollogaston · 1786044409 · focus · HN ↗

               I still don't understand why all that dynamic config stuff isn't just Python. Sure, static configs should be protos, but GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. Have heard some language purity rants involving determinism, but I don't buy it. And they keep inventing new stuff like Starlark. They need to stop.
      10. flymasterv · 1785984183 · focus · HN ↗

          Thank you!

          Google’s tooling was, hands down, the worst I have ever encountered. I did 10 years at GOOG, 3 at AMZN, 4 in research, and another 5 at companies you have heard of but wouldn’t be impressed by, and every day GOOG infuriated me.

          1. rixed · 1785993854 · focus · HN ↗

             You don't measure tooling quality with devs' enjoyment, though, but with what the tools make possible.

             Technical merit is not correlated to popularity, after all.

      11. vintermann · 1785994635 · focus · HN ↗

          Internal tooling? Didn't Jeff Dean write their internal tooling?

          1. frollogaston · 1785995107 · focus · HN ↗

             He wrote the good old parts
   3. Kalanos · 1785963731 · focus · HN ↗

      Gemini has been improving by what feels like 1% every week

      1. xnx · 1786004704 · focus · HN ↗

         68% per year is pretty good!
   4. hintymad · 1785968534 · focus · HN ↗

      This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;signulll&#x2F;status&#x2F;2067446889956430273?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;signulll&#x2F;status&#x2F;2067446889956430273?lang=en

      1. JumpCrisscross · 1785973460 · focus · HN ↗

         <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;signulll&#x2F;status&#x2F;2067446889956430273" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;signulll&#x2F;status&#x2F;2067446889956430273

         1. snthpy · 1785992797 · focus · HN ↗

            Yes, but now we have AI to summarize tweets.
         2. yyaakkqq · 1785999528 · focus · HN ↗

            I wish their deep tech teams moved as fast as the privacy violating ones.
         3. bjackman · 1786009966 · focus · HN ↗

            this prompted me to search and find: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;xcancel&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;xcancel&#x2F;
         4. ChuckMcM · 1786037776 · focus · HN ↗

            In my opinion it carries much truth. Somewhere in Google&#x27;s archives there is a message I sent to the OC that said, &quot;The department of philosophy does not ship solutions to real problems, that is why there has never been a successful company that insisted the world adapt to its philosophy.&quot; Google was, even then, blind to what they were missing.
      2. adityazero · 1785976637 · focus · HN ↗

         &gt; sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.”

         so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.

         1. atmosx · 1786004317 · focus · HN ↗

            That’s how the Brussels bureaucracy works. There is even a TV series about it.
         2. Bendy · 1786009432 · focus · HN ↗

            Reminded me of a bit from the GOAT political comedy Yes, Prime Minister:

            &quot;But he&#x27;s the Prime Minister!&quot;

            &quot;Indeed he is Bernard. He has his own car, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life. What more does he want?&quot;

            &quot;I think he wants to govern Britain.&quot;

            &quot;Well stop him, Bernard!&quot;

            1. titanomachy · 1786046732 · focus · HN ↗

               Oh man, that show has some amazing writing.

               &quot;Tobacco-related diseases cost the NHS £150 million per year!&quot;

               &quot;Yes we&#x27;ve looked into that, it turns out that if those people had survived they would have cost us billions in pensions and healthcare costs! From a financial perspective, it&#x27;s vastly preferable that they continue to die at the current rate.&quot;

         3. imglorp · 1786023951 · focus · HN ↗

            At $work, r&amp;d once had a retreat with a consultant to discuss why our productivity was too low per some spreadsheet. The consultant was told how everyone is in meetings all day so we all stole time from our families at night to get any work done at all. :(
      3. utopcell · 1785977920 · focus · HN ↗

         I remember a time when a tweet was 140 characters.

         1. jorisw · 1785994621 · focus · HN ↗

            I remember GemTOS
         2. ethbr1 · 1786012383 · focus · HN ↗

            140 characters was likely more efficient, in terms of forcing people to focus their thoughts.

            But it was unpopular, in that people don&#x27;t like mental effort.

      4. trueno · 1785981138 · focus · HN ↗

         lmao that&#x27;s actually so good
      5. nunez · 1785984049 · focus · HN ↗

         Nice post, but this reads as the Google of yesterday and the OpenAI of some near-distant future.
      6. throw-the-towel · 1785984096 · focus · HN ↗

         This is so good, it gave me flashbacks.
      7. dnchdnd · 1785985702 · focus · HN ↗

         So believable until the last line, alas Gemini being this useful is completely implausible.
      8. deepsun · 1785986003 · focus · HN ↗

         Regardless of how much I hate Musk, he did a great job of firing 80% of Twitter staff.
      9. neutralx · 1786002741 · focus · HN ↗

         I can see this as a screenplay for one of the KRAZAM[0] videos.

         [0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@KRAZAM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@KRAZAM

      10. atmosx · 1786004216 · focus · HN ↗

          Pure gold, lol.
      11. _the_inflator · 1786013099 · focus · HN ↗

          You made my day. As tragic as it reads, it is on point.
      12. jpcompartir · 1786025568 · focus · HN ↗

          I can&#x27;t be the only person who never finds these made up dialogues funny, right?
      13. chaostheory · 1786026666 · focus · HN ↗

          Mike Judge needs to do another Silicon Valley series on HBO
      14. devy · 1786029022 · focus · HN ↗

          Did Gemini created this Silicon Valley TV show episode script? Makes so much sense...
      15. newswasboring · 1786038231 · focus · HN ↗

          Best thing I read all day. I also work in a multi billion dollar enterprise and man this is so relatable it hurts.
   5. shadowtree · 1785976285 · focus · HN ↗

      All this talent has delivered... Gemini.

      Oh well, emperors, clothes, ... you know.

      1. gizajob · 1785979665 · focus · HN ↗

         Gemini is arguably the fulfilment of what AskJeeves promised and never delivered, nor did the rest of Silicon Valley succeed in natural language search and question answering for the 30 years it took to finally arrive. Gemini works great for answering questions and delivering answers for probably 90%+ of the things that people are going to ask Google for, while running on Google’s TPUs paid for with Google’s profits instead of hyper expensive Nvidia racks funded with VC Hopium, and integrated seamlessly free of sign ups to novel portals.
   6. [deleted] · 1785979632 · focus · HN ↗

      [deleted]

   7. overfeed · 1785991767 · focus · HN ↗

      &gt; And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL

      As an outsider, Google seems to have a knack for minting prominence for their talent.

   8. nolist_policy · 1785998804 · focus · HN ↗

      &gt; Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen

      The Trump admin is now regulating frontier models though.

   9. HlessClaudesman · 1785998809 · focus · HN ↗

      Maybe Google&#x27;s decision to waste everyone&#x27;s time and pollute the truth ecosystem by pushing half baked AI assertions into search was a mistake.

      1. ed_elliott_asc · 1786013666 · focus · HN ↗

         I quite like the ai&#x2F;search thing - I like that there is a super accessible ai I can ask questions without infecting my ChatGPT history

         1. krige · 1786013969 · focus · HN ↗

            The answers it gives are often trash though, even more so the whatever lobotimized model they slap on top of google search.
         2. ShadowOfThePit · 1786021409 · focus · HN ↗

            Why not just use temporary chats for ChatGPT?
         3. tim333 · 1786028109 · focus · HN ↗

            I quite like it too. Convenience I guess.
   10. cineticdaffodil · 1786009046 · focus · HN ↗

       [dead]

   11. amelius · 1786017702 · focus · HN ↗

       Some of these ex-Googlers apparently are starting a new company. Any news around that? Curious what they&#x27;re up to ...
   12. maeln · 1786019859 · focus · HN ↗

       To be fair, I think it&#x27;s pretty hard as an AI company to secure your top worker right now unless you have a significant equity compensation. Once your name is known, and you can say you are&#x2F;were &quot;top AI researcher at OpenAI&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Anthropic&quot;, you can probably just make you own company and raise enough money that even if the company fails, you will probably make more off of it than what you would have at your previous place of employment.

       1. taw1285 · 1786030349 · focus · HN ↗

          You mean via taking secondary via subsequent rounds right? Or can they walk away with any if company flops after a giant 1st round.
       2. barbarr · 1786031556 · focus · HN ↗

          Anyone know how much these founders generally pay themselves &#x2F; how much they receive in liquidity each raise?
   13. shevy-java · 1786020550 · focus · HN ↗

       Ever since Google became an adCompany, it rarely innovated anymore.

       1. jpadkins · 1786025070 · focus · HN ↗

          So it hasn&#x27;t innovated since Oct of 2000? (when AdWords launched)
   14. greenmoonx · 1786024217 · focus · HN ↗

       [dead]

   15. geodel · 1786024402 · focus · HN ↗

       Did all these names were huge before joining Google, and Google used their extraordinary hiring skills to get them? Or a whole bunch of them had challenging problems to solve and ample resources at their disposal to become huge?

       To me it is good thing in either case. Extraordinary people are leaving to make even faster research and development. A lot of talent in Google hitherto unnamed is going to get chance to shine.

   16. alfalfasprout · 1786033248 · focus · HN ↗

       Sundar Pichai began the downfall of Google by most accounts. It went from an engineer driven culture to one of infighting, politics, and bureaucracy. It&#x27;s telling when xooglers nowadays complain of maintenance and improvement of products being a career dead end vs. shipping new things. And there being so much empire building.
   17. narrator · 1786040098 · focus · HN ↗

       The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists.

       I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and had should have rights. At least at Grok, Elon said he wanted an AI dedicated to the truth which is an easier target to hit than what the Google gatekeepers probably wanted. The ideological purity of a Google AI must have been a real moving target though, and retraining an AI is not an cheap or fast thing.

       1. j2kun · 1786040999 · focus · HN ↗

          I recommend touching grass.
       2. anon84873628 · 1786042975 · focus · HN ↗

          Hard to explain the departure of Timnit Gebru if that&#x27;s the case. Unless you think they actually changed corporate culture so dramatically because of that event...
   18. MetaverseClub · 1786042714 · focus · HN ↗

       &quot;prominent names&quot;, lmao

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