Thread

1. GodelNumbering · 1785950655 · 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 · 1785953588 · 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. summerlight · 1785966266 · focus · HN ↗

         It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".

         1. frollogaston · 1785966722 · focus · HN ↗

            I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.

            1. ragall · 1786051588 · focus · HN ↗

               You have no clue what you're talking about.

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