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

810 points · 862 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. frollogaston · · 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. vkou · · 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 · · 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.
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