Thread

1. atleastoptimal · 1785947160 · 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. vineyardmike · 1785948834 · focus · HN ↗

      The answer is far more benign.

      They getting a higher ROI renting their TPUs to Anthropic et al instead of performing training and serving their own models. Google cloud has insane backlog, and has rapidly expanded to satisfy it. While those DCs get built, they’re cannibalizing their own products for it.

      This makes sense because (1) they are investors in Anthropic, so they still win and (2) they can always catch up on model training later when the profit opportunity shifts, or abandon it if there is no way to recapture that value.

      1. chermi · 1785971071 · focus · HN ↗

         I don't think Google is that freaking short-sighted. Even if you're not trying to be frontier, the value of having domain knowledge via experience for AI is worth saving internal compute alone. By all accounts Google believes in ai as much as everyone else.

         If AI turns out 1/100 as important as they seem to think, it would be insane to intentionally be slack on it.

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