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

810 points · 862 comments · colesantiago

  1. atleastoptimal · · 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. ralph84 · · focus · HN ↗
      Google was offering researchers the Bell Labs/Xerox PARC model of comfortable budgets and pay but capped upside. And just like with Bell Labs and Xerox PARC the inventions at Google got productized elsewhere by people chasing the uncapped upside. Google would have been happy to keep LLMs in the research lab forever and never productize any of it. ChatGPT forced their hand.
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