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

818 points · 871 comments · colesantiago

  1. GodelNumbering · · 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 · · focus · HN ↗
      Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
      1. GodelNumbering · · focus · HN ↗
        Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.
        1. clhodapp · · 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          That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.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 · · 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_ · · 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 · · 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 · · 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 · · focus · HN ↗
          All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
        3. ozgrakkurt · · 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 · · focus · HN ↗
          Google owns 15% of Anthropic. They'll be winning either way.
      4. ActionHank · · focus · HN ↗

        [dead]

      5. mips_avatar · · 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 · · 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 · · focus · HN ↗
        It was always benchmaxxed
      7. chaostheory · · 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.
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