Thread

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. 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...

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.