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

810 points · 862 comments · colesantiago

  1. gandalfgeek · · focus · HN ↗
    Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.

    There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".

    1. oblio · · focus · HN ↗
      Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.
      1. impulser_ · · focus · HN ↗
        People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.
      2. swat535 · · focus · HN ↗
        > Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.

        They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,..

        You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals.

        I don't think Google is going anywhere.

      3. utopcell · · focus · HN ↗
        Who knows what will happen in 20 years. Right now, it's not the case.
    2. karmasimida · · focus · HN ↗
      Literally, I am ... I don't know what to say
      1. ignoramous · · focus · HN ↗

        [dead]

    3. MattCruikshank · · focus · HN ↗
      Did Jeff and Sanjay pair write their resignation letter? Wow.
    4. rhipitr · · focus · HN ↗
      Isn’t alphabet an investor in their new endeavor?
    5. la6479 · · focus · HN ↗
      This just shows that the "great minds" of AI in these companies are not able to come up with anything that radically differentiates their AI than the others. Wether it is gemini or openAI or grok - meh they all are similar and at this point one can interchange one with the other , excep that Google sits right at the edge with almost every browser search query hitting the google search engine AKA Gemini on the backend and one can switch easily into chat mode right from the search page. I dare say that the google CEO has done his job and set up the cash printing machine but from the AI masterminds in Google, not a groundbreaking progress has been made.
      1. largbae · · focus · HN ↗
        AlphaFold is interesting. Maybe LLMs converge because the ideal "use of language" converges. But there are other types of model.
      2. ionwake · · focus · HN ↗
        I don’t know man I prefer Gemini to everything other than claude I’m really surprised at the late comeback and happy for it
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