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> “I haven't heard that myself,” Hassabis says after I bring up the CEO talk. He instantly points to how busy he is with research, how much invention is just ah

> “I haven't heard that myself,” Hassabis says after I bring up the CEO talk. He instantly points to how busy he is with research, how much invention is just ahead, and how much he wants to be part of it. Perhaps, given the stakes, that’s right where Google needs him. “I can do management,” he says, ”but it's not my passion. Put it that way. I always try to optimize for the research and the science.” Sundar makes ~200M as the CEO of Google whereas DeepMind sold for ~400-650M. There's plenty of monetary incentive to take the job, not to mention more power to set the company direction through resource allocation. And it's clear that there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. Maybe Hassabis is a contender because he's been getting some pretty serious press since the beginning of the year (which is when the Sundar article grumblings started).

londons_explore 3y ago
> there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. There has been mumblings of that for the whole time he has been CEO...
- underdeserver 3y ago
  Google has been failing continuously in user experience under his leadership: 1. Search has become an ad-riddled, clickbait SEO infested mess 2. All those naming kerfuffles (how's Allo and GSuite doing?) 3. Cloud still significantly behind AWS and Azure 4. AI stuff behind at least OpenAI and Anthropic. Applied ML stuff well behind specialized startups. 5. Pixel still not selling very well. Android still feeling like it's trying to catch up to Apple, still fragmented. 6. Layoffs everyone believed wouldn't happen until the very last second they were announced. 7. Customer support story, including toward large cloud customers, still abysmal. Etc etc. Yes, ad revenue increased and with it the share price, but ad revenue comes from having had a good product 5 years ago. To sustain it you need good products and good engineers to build them. Google is trending downward. It needs a fresh CEO.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
Workaccount2 3y ago
Who would waste money on a PR campaign? Googles fumblings of the last ~5 years speak for themselves.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  You don’t need to pay money on things like this. You leverage your contacts to create profiles like this article. The newspaper gets access and you get your profile elevated. And it wouldn’t be google the company doing this but players within the company / influential and powerful shareholders etc.
tdullien 3y ago
You don't need a PR campaign to oust Sundar. I think 7 out of 10 Googlers would agree that Sundar is uninspiring and has allowed the erosion of most of what was good about Google's culture. I left partially because I hated the feeling that "this year will be average - meaning worse than last year but better than next year". Slow downward drift, culture erosion, lack of leadership, lack of clarity, etc. Management isn't leadership, and Sundar is more of a manager than a leader.
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  Very well put
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  My impression from the outside is indeed that the man is a problem. And part of the problem is that the problem is allowed to continue to exist by the Alphabet board. Which means the real problem is over there. They are just looking at the stock price, which is of course fine. Until it isn't. I think the whole point of Sundar always was that he's very obviously not a leader. He's a care taker. I used to work in a big multi national (Nokia) with a care taker CEO (Olli Pekka Kallasvuo) who took over from the man that grew Nokia from a large but insignificant Finnish company to the smart phone behemoth it was around 2005 (Jorma Ollila). Kallasvuo presided over the emergence of the Apple's iphone and Google's Android as the two new competitors that ultimately killed it off. And did nothing whatsoever about it. The man was a bean counter whose job it was to protect the stock price. By the time the Nokia board (under leadership of the former CEO, Ollila) appointed a new CEO (Stephen Elop, an MS executive) with the clear intention to orchestrate some collaboration with and the eventual takeover by MS, it was already too late. Nokia flailed for a few years and MS eventually pulled the plug a year after acquiring what remained of the phone business unit for next to nothing. By then the stock price had tanked, market share was in the gutter, and the value was gone. Everything the board thought they knew about smart phones was no longer relevant. Ollila got removed from the board in the aftermath. People blame CEOs, but it's the boards of these companies that appoint these CEOs, protect them, and decline to fire them when they fail. That's where the problems are. Nothing changes until you fix the boards. It's always fixable with the right people and leadership. Just look at MS post Ballmer. In Alphabet's case, the two founders are on the board and they are the ones that put Sundar in their place. Maybe it's time for them to move on? Of course the issue is that they have a lot of shares (class B) in Alphabet. Institutional investors have about 35% of the class A shares and the rest is publicly traded. So, nothing happens until the stock nosedives. By which time it might be too late.
strangattractor 3y ago
My own perception of OpenAI vs Google seems at odds with many things I read. I don't really see Google as being behind at all. 1. Google pretty much invented the technology (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) 2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute and access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI on both counts. 3. New models are released on a weekly basis by all sorts of companies. So OpenAI has no monopoly on LLM models. In fact their competition is staggering (NVIDIA, Meta, Google, DataBricks, Amazon (numerous other startups)) It will not be long before there are even more. It seems to me that Altman saw this all as a timing thing. Reveal your cards now and force others to do the same in the hopes of obtaining a strategic position over competitors. Googles cashflow seems to be doing just fine and I haven't had to fight off any urges to use Bing.
- meragrin_ 3y ago
  > 1. Google pretty much invented the technology (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) > 2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute and access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI on both counts. If a smaller company with less compute and data commercializes something before Google which has more compute and data, doesn't that mean they are behind? You don't measure a car race by fuel available in the pit and faster top speed. You measure by who gets to the finish first. It just goes to show that Google has a horrible driver.
  - jonplackett 3y ago
    I guess the point is this is a very long race and, actually, the end is still quite far away (if that end is AGI). In his Lex Friedman interview Altman asks ‘what has ChatGPT really fundamentally changed about the world?’ - basically making the point that they’re still just getting started. Having a tonne of compute and cash is still going to be really important in this race. You have to make it to the finish line to win.
  - strangattractor 3y ago
    Part of the point I was trying to make is that there is less benefit to Google to tout their advances - most of this are trade secrets. I could see them using it to enhance their current offerings in subtle ways. Now that the cat is out of the bag that will likely change. Just because OpenAI publicly released a produce doesn't mean Google has not developed their own. It doesn't mean they have either. These models still have a long way to go before they can advise Kirk on running the Enterprise:)
blueboo 3y ago
Beware popularity in the Landsraad
laurex 3y ago
At some point is more money really important? My impression from meeting Demis like a decade ago is that he is an actual good person. Being a CEO of a top corporation does not seem like a good life move for someone who cares about others. There are myriad examples of how much engineers who become managers-only find it insufferable. If you're excited about thinking about the technical problems of AGI, is simply more money (or even more power) going to matter?
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  It is very hard for me to imagine an engineer who has FU money picking a CEO position that pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year over an innovative, R&D type position that likely pays tens of millions of dollars a year.

londons_explore 3y ago

> there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. There has been mumblings of that for the whole time he has been CEO...

underdeserver 3y ago
Google has been failing continuously in user experience under his leadership: 1. Search has become an ad-riddled, clickbait SEO infested mess 2. All those naming kerfuffles (how's Allo and GSuite doing?) 3. Cloud still significantly behind AWS and Azure 4. AI stuff behind at least OpenAI and Anthropic. Applied ML stuff well behind specialized startups. 5. Pixel still not selling very well. Android still feeling like it's trying to catch up to Apple, still fragmented. 6. Layoffs everyone believed wouldn't happen until the very last second they were announced. 7. Customer support story, including toward large cloud customers, still abysmal. Etc etc. Yes, ad revenue increased and with it the share price, but ad revenue comes from having had a good product 5 years ago. To sustain it you need good products and good engineers to build them. Google is trending downward. It needs a fresh CEO.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

Workaccount2 3y ago

Who would waste money on a PR campaign? Googles fumblings of the last ~5 years speak for themselves.

vlovich123 3y ago
You don’t need to pay money on things like this. You leverage your contacts to create profiles like this article. The newspaper gets access and you get your profile elevated. And it wouldn’t be google the company doing this but players within the company / influential and powerful shareholders etc.

tdullien 3y ago

You don't need a PR campaign to oust Sundar. I think 7 out of 10 Googlers would agree that Sundar is uninspiring and has allowed the erosion of most of what was good about Google's culture. I left partially because I hated the feeling that "this year will be average - meaning worse than last year but better than next year". Slow downward drift, culture erosion, lack of leadership, lack of clarity, etc. Management isn't leadership, and Sundar is more of a manager than a leader.

jack_riminton 3y ago
Very well put
jillesvangurp 3y ago
My impression from the outside is indeed that the man is a problem. And part of the problem is that the problem is allowed to continue to exist by the Alphabet board. Which means the real problem is over there. They are just looking at the stock price, which is of course fine. Until it isn't. I think the whole point of Sundar always was that he's very obviously not a leader. He's a care taker. I used to work in a big multi national (Nokia) with a care taker CEO (Olli Pekka Kallasvuo) who took over from the man that grew Nokia from a large but insignificant Finnish company to the smart phone behemoth it was around 2005 (Jorma Ollila). Kallasvuo presided over the emergence of the Apple's iphone and Google's Android as the two new competitors that ultimately killed it off. And did nothing whatsoever about it. The man was a bean counter whose job it was to protect the stock price. By the time the Nokia board (under leadership of the former CEO, Ollila) appointed a new CEO (Stephen Elop, an MS executive) with the clear intention to orchestrate some collaboration with and the eventual takeover by MS, it was already too late. Nokia flailed for a few years and MS eventually pulled the plug a year after acquiring what remained of the phone business unit for next to nothing. By then the stock price had tanked, market share was in the gutter, and the value was gone. Everything the board thought they knew about smart phones was no longer relevant. Ollila got removed from the board in the aftermath. People blame CEOs, but it's the boards of these companies that appoint these CEOs, protect them, and decline to fire them when they fail. That's where the problems are. Nothing changes until you fix the boards. It's always fixable with the right people and leadership. Just look at MS post Ballmer. In Alphabet's case, the two founders are on the board and they are the ones that put Sundar in their place. Maybe it's time for them to move on? Of course the issue is that they have a lot of shares (class B) in Alphabet. Institutional investors have about 35% of the class A shares and the rest is publicly traded. So, nothing happens until the stock nosedives. By which time it might be too late.

strangattractor 3y ago

My own perception of OpenAI vs Google seems at odds with many things I read. I don't really see Google as being behind at all. 1. Google pretty much invented the technology (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) 2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute and access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI on both counts. 3. New models are released on a weekly basis by all sorts of companies. So OpenAI has no monopoly on LLM models. In fact their competition is staggering (NVIDIA, Meta, Google, DataBricks, Amazon (numerous other startups)) It will not be long before there are even more. It seems to me that Altman saw this all as a timing thing. Reveal your cards now and force others to do the same in the hopes of obtaining a strategic position over competitors. Googles cashflow seems to be doing just fine and I haven't had to fight off any urges to use Bing.

meragrin_ 3y ago
> 1. Google pretty much invented the technology (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) > 2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute and access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI on both counts. If a smaller company with less compute and data commercializes something before Google which has more compute and data, doesn't that mean they are behind? You don't measure a car race by fuel available in the pit and faster top speed. You measure by who gets to the finish first. It just goes to show that Google has a horrible driver.
- jonplackett 3y ago
  I guess the point is this is a very long race and, actually, the end is still quite far away (if that end is AGI). In his Lex Friedman interview Altman asks ‘what has ChatGPT really fundamentally changed about the world?’ - basically making the point that they’re still just getting started. Having a tonne of compute and cash is still going to be really important in this race. You have to make it to the finish line to win.
- strangattractor 3y ago
  Part of the point I was trying to make is that there is less benefit to Google to tout their advances - most of this are trade secrets. I could see them using it to enhance their current offerings in subtle ways. Now that the cat is out of the bag that will likely change. Just because OpenAI publicly released a produce doesn't mean Google has not developed their own. It doesn't mean they have either. These models still have a long way to go before they can advise Kirk on running the Enterprise:)

blueboo 3y ago

Beware popularity in the Landsraad

laurex 3y ago

At some point is more money really important? My impression from meeting Demis like a decade ago is that he is an actual good person. Being a CEO of a top corporation does not seem like a good life move for someone who cares about others. There are myriad examples of how much engineers who become managers-only find it insufferable. If you're excited about thinking about the technical problems of AGI, is simply more money (or even more power) going to matter?

VirusNewbie 3y ago
It is very hard for me to imagine an engineer who has FU money picking a CEO position that pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year over an innovative, R&D type position that likely pays tens of millions of dollars a year.