15 ms·

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

• adolph 3mo ago
  "Dean and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider.: Kinsley Gaffe: A mistake whereby a politician inadvertently says something truthful which they had not meant to reveal. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe
  • inerte 3mo ago
    I don't get what you mean? To me the biggest news is Jeff and Sanjay leaving Google... but then not really, since Google will be "an investor". I guess that's sorta their retirement plan? And is Discovery Loop actually part of Alphabet? So complicated.
    • owlninja 3mo ago
      I think he was referring to an obvious typo "publicity benefit corporation"
    • tonfa 3mo ago
      Google is just an investor, it's not a subsidiary.
  • xdavidliu 3mo ago
    the typo was the Axios article, not from Google's own announcement
• WarmWash 3mo ago
  Absolute earthquake at Deepmind the last few months...
  • FartyMcFarter 3mo ago
    What do you mean?
    • huntertwo 3mo ago
      There is no Gemini 3.5 pro despite multiple announcements?
    • WarmWash 3mo ago
      If you search "Deepmind departures" you'll see a string of high profile ones. This is also coupled with the numerous 3.5 pro delays (and strongly suspected underperformance when released). Something was definitely going down internally.
      • segmondy 3mo ago
        they are not going to get rewarded as much as they will make going to openai or anthropic. Google is not insane to pay tens and hundreds of millions to individuals like Zuck is. Crazy as it seems, Zuck might have been right, they seem to have stepped back into the arena with Muse.
• xtreak29 3mo ago
  https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724 https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724 > Announcing Discovery Loop! > I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • manvel_hn 3mo ago
    It's quite interesting that those events are happening at the same moment. I wonder whether they are related
    • aix1 3mo ago
      I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.
      • HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
        Isn't it "just" a matter of Jeff Dean (& co) leaving, Hassabis replacing Dean, and Kavukcuoglu replacing Hassabis ? A massive shake up for sure, but why do you see it as separate events merely timed to coincide ?
        • aix1 2mo ago
          So there are two events here: Event 1 - Jeff & co leaving. Event 2 - Demis stepping down. DeepMind doesn't need a "chair" and "Alphabet's chief scientist" is a bullshit title that Jeff invented for himself when he moved from Google Research to GDM, to make it look like we wasn't abandoning the former for the latter. The third change is basically ratifying the status quo, since Koray has been de factor running GDM for a while now (and directly reporting to Sundar in addition to reporting to Demis, who in turn also reported to Sundar - quite some triangle there).
• epolanski 3mo ago
  That's..huge. Hassabis has been the most important figure of the last 15 years in AI. Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.
• tosh 3mo ago
  can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
  • colesantiago 3mo ago
    It is good for Demis and Google overall. This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era. Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms. The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.
    • sashank_1509 3mo ago
      I agree sundar will step down but I’m not sure if this means they’re grooming Demis to takeover. I suspect not, and someone else might take over.
      • tonfa 3mo ago
        Similar to how Sundar was promoted, isn't it more likely to be a promotion from existing leadership (one of the product leads/SVP).
    • aix1 3mo ago
      > this could be a path for Demis to be CEO in the future in the AI era His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no? P.S. I think his real interest is Isomorphic, and his new role will offer fewer distractions.
    • tosh 3mo ago
      ty!
    • lokar 3mo ago
      My impression, inside and out of G, was that Sundar (and Ruth) were about scaling down R&D expenses (as a fraction of revenue), and focusing on exploiting the monopolies. Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.
• jarpschope 3mo ago
  I found this article more thorough: https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leadership-deepmind-chief-shifts-role-2026-08-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...
• xnx 3mo ago
  > Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
  • Analemma_ 3mo ago
    For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?
    • xnx 3mo ago
      Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system
      • conradkay 3mo ago
        Are any of those advantages getting stronger over time? I guess TPUs but Google is selling several gigawatts to Anthropic
        • solenoid0937 3mo ago
          Google owns 14% of Anthropic. If Anthropic gets to superintelligence, Google wins as well. Google doesn't really need a frontier lab of its own.
        • ai_fry_ur_brain 3mo ago
          The money is in selling compute not using it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a mark.
      • throwaway667555 3mo ago
• ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
  Source: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203 https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203 (https://xcancel.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203 https://xcancel.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203)
• eamag 3mo ago
  Google's stock dropped 5% right away, 200billion of value
  • peter422 3mo ago
    In theory I think the stock should be going up because his tenure has found Google getting left behind.
  • rvz 3mo ago
    And? I bought more. This is excellent news. This over-reaction is why people can't see over a long time horizon. This is great news for Google as they realize that Sundar is the problem and he will soon leave Google for Demis to be the new CEO of Alphabet (Google) which I am predicting. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868160
    • xnx 3mo ago
      AI is critically important to Google, but there's a lot more to Google than just having a frontier AI model. Do Demis skills line up with what the whole company needs? It's going to be tough to beat Sundar's 1200% increase in stock price.
    • mupuff1234 3mo ago
      Why would they do this extra step if that were the case?
    • SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
      I sold out of my position. I can imagine a story where it works out in the long term, but I don't see how this doesn't cause terrible retention problems in the short to medium term. I felt a pull to launch a startup when I heard Jeff Dean was leaving, and I'm a long time big corp employee who hasn't been at Google in over a decade.
  • aix1 3mo ago
    It's weird for an announcement like this to drop in the middle of a trading day. I wonder if it got leaked, forcing the timing.
• toshinoriyagi 3mo ago
  Deepmind always worked on some of the coolest architectures. Following things like AlphaStar, AlphaGo, and more were extremely exciting and felt like the hacker persona of machine learning. I hope Google can take advantage of this awesome team. They've done incredible work.
• zuzululu 3mo ago
  anybody watching the pace of output from Gemini team has been nothing but disappointing. meanwhile anthropic and openai has surpassed them. I do wonder if anybody working at Google can give us an insight why the chaos and lack of competitiveness?
  • frollogaston 3mo ago
    Not GDM, but tech island was strangling when I was there. Everyone will probably say different things.
• htrp 3mo ago
  Between Shazeer and these guys Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads
• hypnodrones 3mo ago
  Today I saw one of the most talented engineers I know and worked with leave DeepMind and now I probably know part of the "why". Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.
  • misiti3780 3mo ago
    I disagree - I will be surprised if google doesnt win the AI race long term. They have the money, the chips, and the ability to attract talent.
    • gboss 3mo ago
      Ever heard of the innovator’s dilemma? Don’t underestimate the inertia of large companies and their unwillingness to pivot from their cash cow.
      • jerlam 3mo ago
        Google specifically has a track record. You could have made the same argument about social media (Google+) a decade ago.
        • krapht 3mo ago
          social media is a completely different market though - since there are massive returns to scale, it's incredibly hard for a new entrant to break in. model training and inference is the opposite. people switch LLMs like people change clothes in the morning. there are popular services (openrouter) that make moving as easy as changing a model string.
          • rowyourboat 3mo ago
            Which poses the question: Why does Google even need to catch up? At least currently, the name of the game is integration. The actual model is a commodity.
      • andsoitis 3mo ago
• htrp 3mo ago
  Hassabis is being promoted to Chair of Deepmind
  • TheqO 3mo ago
    Who is going to be sitting on him?
• tacomonstrous 3mo ago
  Everyone commenting here seems to take this to mean he's leaving Google, when that's not what the article says.
  • brokencode 3mo ago
    Clearly his influence is going to be less though. And most likely this is a calculated step to avoid freaking people out, even though he is effectively leaving.
    • baq 3mo ago
      Not at all clear. To me it looks like he’ll be in a position to actually be unhobble DeepMind - reminder DM was sitting on a ChatGPT product for a whole year before ChatGPT got released (LMChat) and Google didn’t let them release it.
      • Davidzheng 3mo ago
        if him leaving unhobbles gdm, it'll be because he has less influence...
      • sailingparrot 3mo ago
        > DM was sitting on a ChatGPT product for a whole year before ChatGPT got released (LMChat) and Google didn’t let them release it. Heard this multiple time, to me this is pure history rewriting and post-rationalization. OpenAI also had a internal chat app before chatgpt, Microsoft had multiple, a bunch of other players also had internal chatgpt equivalents + many startups built some using OAI API. The breakthrough of ChatGPT wasnt because OAI were the first to think of that (absolutely obvious and basic) product, it was because they were the first to get a model strong enough to be actually useful to talk to, vs a mere fun novelty. There is no evidence whatsoever that DM ever had such a model that they decide not to talk about/release.
        • WarmWash 3mo ago
          OAI was the first to throw safety to the wind. Everyone else was scared to unleashed it on the general public because it was too powerful with too many unknowns (in ~2022, hindsight is different) Altman didn't give a fuck, first mover was more important to him.
• Handy-Man 3mo ago
  Jeff and Sanjay both leaving!
• atleastoptimal 3mo ago
  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.
  • LZ_Khan 3mo ago
    I've always thought this as well.
    • abakker 3mo ago
      Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?
      • jaccola 3mo ago
        What is anticompetitive about it? The comment above is literally claiming they’ve been outcompeted.
      • SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
        Not sure that's the right way to look at it, given that Google's huge head start in capital and talent did not prevent AI competition at all. It's a demonstration of reasonable, non-problematic dynamics between smaller and larger companies. (Of course, there's an implicit risk here, the folks at Cruise probably worked harder and more passionately than Waymo staff too.)
        • abakker 3mo ago
          you are right. I guess what I was thinking was that google's bigness was essentially a bad capital allocation strategy, since they were lazy and not motivated by absolute return, but some combination of acceptable risk, politics, personal preferences, etc in a large management team that has seemed...disconnected for quite some time. They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability is also a handicap when disruption is the objective.
• tough 3mo ago
  Oh wow demis and Jeff, that Ethics engineer who left GDM, and reached to both and posted on lesswrong a couple weeks [1] ago did make a difference? 1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left-google-deepmind https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
  • bkishan 3mo ago
    what was the post?
    • tough 3mo ago
      https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left-google-deepmind https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
  • TulliusCicero 3mo ago
    ...you think they've only been planning this for a couple weeks?
    • tough 3mo ago
      hmm not really, and it probably isnt the origin, but im glad to see him vindicated by having both C-level google leadership people who targeted to try and either stop google from doing the pentagon deal, both stepping down the same day. At least it makes me feel like he reaching out might have made a difference on remembering this people killer robots are bad, and being part of it might not be on the best of their interests to go down on history for
  • cma 3mo ago
    Alex Turner discusses a bit here at this timestamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGlJQHVeKIA&t=14m27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGlJQHVeKIA&t=14m27s
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• amberjack 3mo ago
  So how many people from DeepMind have left now? Not looking too good for Google.
• bkishan 3mo ago
  By the article, it looks like he's actually stepping up.
  • dwroberts 3mo ago
    Yeah I actually read this more as them scrambling because Jeff Dean is leaving? Because that is the role he is taking up
    • sailingparrot 3mo ago
      There is no way a Chief Scientist (essentially IC) role is more important than leading the whole of DeepMind, 6000 people strong, working on the most important product for the future of Alphabet. This means Demis wanted a change and to work on other things, it's not Google wanting this.
      • dwroberts 3mo ago
        Dean has pretty big symbolic importance inside of Google regardless of what his role title is/was Edit: sibling story in front page links to this which explains better in its lede text than what I just wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/technology/google-researchers-ai-startup.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/technology/google-researc...
      • gowld 3mo ago
        Or Sundar wanted Demis to change to work on other things.
  • stabbles 3mo ago
    Your comment says he's stepping up, the HN title says he's stepping down, the article says he's stepping aside. Nobody says if it's a step forward or backward.
    • bink 3mo ago
      It's just a jump to the left...
• scrlk 3mo ago
  What happened to the "strike team" that Sergey Brin was leading to try and improve Gemini's coding performance?
  • chanux 3mo ago
    They tried so hard and got so far..
    • PessimalDecimal 3mo ago
      but in the end...
  • frollogaston 3mo ago
    still waiting on ganpati propagation
    • stormbeard 3mo ago
      Found the Googler.
    • wildrhythms 2mo ago
      U know ball
• segmondy 3mo ago
  End of an era for Alphabet.
  • abirch 3mo ago
    I give it a 51% chance of Discovery Loop being acquired by Google
    • comment0r 3mo ago
      They are already partially funded by Google.
      • segmondy 3mo ago
        I feel it's image management and a bet. If they succeed, Google profits. If they don't succeed it doesn't matter, it's still a signal to the market/wallstreet that there's no "bad blood" between them and Google and that they won't be cannibalizing Google's current interest.
    • aix1 3mo ago
      I actually think there's a low probability of that. The four have so much influence within the company that they could have trivially set this up as part of Alphabet, if they wanted to. They are also ridiculously wealthy.
• ra7 3mo ago
  It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet. The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
  • brandall10 3mo ago
    Yeah, a bit surprised that the top comments aren't discussing losing Dean, he's been a figurehead for the company for decades. It's like Apple losing Ive in a way. EDIT: "figurehead" - that's all I meant. A notable, public figure from the company who is credited with having a significant impact on its evolution. I'm not making a judgement call on his departure, or Ive's, being good or bad. That said... just give it a couple years, they'll be back in a lucrative aquihire.
    • vjvjvjvjghv 3mo ago
      Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.
      • dannyw 3mo ago
        The MacBooks certainly got a lot better and more usable. Anyone remember the touchpad MBP with no physical escape key and the butterfly keyboard? (Respect to many of Ive’s great legacy though)
        • phoghed 3mo ago
          I thought the touch bar was cool and useful, I’ve always remapped caps lock to escape though. Would like one with all the current physical keys plus a Touch Bar that you could do cool stuff with.
        • SkyMarshal 2mo ago
          Also the removal of actually useful things like the Magsafe power connector and SD card slot, in the service of unneeded marginal thinness.
• 650 3mo ago
  The first sentence is quite telling >We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products… Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought
  • add-sub-mul-div 3mo ago
    If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?
  • giwook 3mo ago
    My opinion is that you're reading way too much into this. Talent is obviously first. Without that you have no products worth speaking of.
  • thewebguyd 3mo ago
    Hasn't that always been the case with Google? Outside of a few that are mostly good and have stuck around, I've always seen Google has having great tech but being quite bad and making products out of it.
  • garlic_enjoyer 3mo ago
    I was about to invest in Google, but your compelling observation has swayed me. Now it's obvious to me they are a dying company.
    • giwook 3mo ago
      Guess I'm not taking out a second mortgage on my house anymore to invest in $GOOG.
  • JacobAsmuth 3mo ago
    So then it is similarly telling that compute is second on the list? They have more talent than compute? Layoffs incoming?
  • zdragnar 3mo ago
    A company is made up of people, and makes products. Products can come and go for many reasons (or any reason) but the company will always have people.
• utopcell 3mo ago
  Demis stepped down? Who cares? Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google. We are in uncharted territory.
  • FartyMcFarter 3mo ago
    I think Demis has been way more influential in the past decade. Jeff and Sanjay built a lot of Google's foundational software, but that was a long time ago.
    • utopcell 3mo ago
      Demis is great -- this is not a zero-sum game. Who built what, and the relative importance, is an interesting discussion to have, but it's orthogonal to my point. Which is: When you think about Google, true, old, "don't be evil", tech excellence Google, you don't think about Demis. You think about Jeff's and Sanjay's geeky, technically uncompromising, faces.
    • DannyBee 3mo ago
      Both are very smart. But Jeff was responsible for a lot more of what is actually used today than Demis. Demis is responsible for a lot more of the hype though ;) I think saying Jeff's contributions were a long time ago must represent some kind of lack of understanding of Jeff's recent contributions. Jeff has still been focused more on infrastructure, and that is just more hidden most of the time. I would say,if i was forced to pick someone whose vision to follow, it would definitely be Jeff and not Demis, even today.
      • xnx 3mo ago
        Agree. Demis is very smart, but obviously less humble and more interested in self-promotion. There have been multiple Deepmind documentaries that mythologize the Demis origin story.
        • tim333 3mo ago
          Not sure it's being less humble so much as the story being interesting for the public - chess wizz and game developer out to solve intelligence, makes AlphaGo tha beats humans at go, AlphaFold that gets the nobel prize. With Jeff Dean developing Bigtable and Spanner, no general public know what those are.
• throwaw12 3mo ago
  This move was expected when Google shifted focus to Gemini-only.
• tanh 3mo ago
  I guess Demis was about world models and the old talent saw the writing on the wall. Noam was a big one and this is just a continuation of that. Don’t understand how Sundar is still running things, though.
• wmf 3mo ago
  He's failing up and out of the blast zone. He won't be responsible if Gemini 4 fails.
• ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
  Related: The next chapter of our AI momentum https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• antirez 3mo ago
  Chinese labs are the proof that there is no need of big names, but of the right mindset and agility. It's those last things that Google truly misses, but now they are missing for a long time, and outside the AI divisions too, in almost every department of the company.
• sidcool 3mo ago
  Sundar Pichai: @DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs. https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093 https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093 So it's not stepping down, right?
  • anvuong 3mo ago
    But Alphabet is just a holding company, what does Chief Scientist of Alphabet even mean?
    • atonse 3mo ago
      It means "please, he's still here, don't let the stock plummet"
      • gorn 3mo ago
        It still did.
        • frollogaston 3mo ago
          Could've been a lot worse
        • FartyMcFarter 3mo ago
          4% drop is a nothingburger. Stocks drop more than that for overreactions to random news all the time.
  • flakiness 3mo ago
    Chairman is a stepping stone for a retirement/resignation. Apple's Tim Cook. Google's Eric Schmidt. The list goes on.
  • atonse 3mo ago
    If it's anything like what happened with others (like Eric Schmidt), Chairman is basically "you're out from day to day stuff but we'll give you a pot of money to say you're still senior and still here, to save face and the stock price, while you give a bunch of talks for the next few months" So yes fancy title, but basically, someone who can move the stock price is quitting and we're trying to ease the perception of it.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• bsdpython 3mo ago
  Jeff Dean leaving Google should be the headline but big news all around for Google AI nonetheless
• dyauspitr 3mo ago
  This doesn’t sound like stepping down this sounds like stepping up within Google.
  • tonfa 3mo ago
    It usually isn't, Chairman doesn't involve day to day supervision and decision making. When Eric Schmidt became chairman or Ruth Porat became president, this was more a transition towards less involvement than an increase of impact.
    • VirusNewbie 3mo ago
      He means the chief scientist part. Before Demis had no influence on cloud, tpu development, day to day dev tools, etc.
      • tonfa 3mo ago
        Demis took Jeff former title. (Jeff became Chief Scientist when Brain was dissolved into deepmind) I suspect the SVP/CEO leading Deepmind has a lot more sway over the rest of the company than someone with a title and no reports. :) (Also the 20y+ of contributions and having built much of the base Google infra probably gave more influence to Jeff than the remaining title)
• heaney-555 3mo ago
  The Gemini 3.5 Pro delay has been catastrophic for Google. I'm really curious what has gone on behind the scenes there. But missing out right as AI coding agents become genuinely deeply capable and useful is just an immense failure.
  • xnx 3mo ago
    They're definitely "down", but by no means "out". They're probably back in another "code red" and will need to deliver something leading edge in some area next. My bet is that Google will be the first to crack continuous knowledge cutoff updates to their model.
  • levocardia 3mo ago
    Surely the two leading candidates must be (a) the model is just not that good, or (b) it is misaligned in a pretty obvious way that can't be swept under the rug.
    • heaney-555 3mo ago
      Sure, but the question is why either of those things happened, given Google's immense resources and talent. The fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceXAI and 3 different Chinese companies were all able to train big models without these issues, yet Google could not, seems shocking.
• ddp26 3mo ago
  I would have thought Jeff Dean would never ever leave Google. What on earth is going on?
• quaintdev 3mo ago
  I wonder if this has anything to do with it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left-google-deepmind https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
  • next_xibalba 3mo ago
    Doubtful. His destination is both funded by Google and has a compute deal with Google.
• jmyeet 3mo ago
  Two thoughts on this. First, it is incredibly difficult to pivot a large organization because there are too many competing interests, too many fiefdoms people have built and too much organizational inertia. A new company has the advantage of a singularity of purpose. Google has to compete with internal interests about AI disrupting search, ad revenue and so on. This can slow you down and limit the resources you get. It's why companies get disrupted, particularly when they reach monopoly status. Steve jobs said it best [1]. Second, Gogole's path here (IMHO) is to make their own hardware. They've already done this with their TPUs but need to be able to compete with NVidia offerings. NVidia controlling the price, features and, most importantly, who gets to buy them is bad for Google. This is what Google should be pouring billions into. The beauty of this is that success is easily measurable against metrics like price-per-petaflops, performance-per-Watt and so on. Throw money at some key Nvidia engineers and have them design silicon for you for TSMC to fab. I still believe that Google is positioned to survive the (IMHO) inevitable AI bubble popping. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=3s
• conartist6 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• nphardon 3mo ago
  Wow we just had a post on here a couple weeks ago about Jeff Dean supporting dissident voices at Google.
• rossdavidh 3mo ago
  A few points: 1) the simplest explanation whenever a bunch of people leave [x] at a company at the same time, is that [x] is becoming less important to that company moving forward. It's not proof, but you know, everyone is trying really hard to say that's not what's happening here. Sometimes the simplest explanation is correct. 2) rumor is that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, got bored during pandemic lockdown and eventually returned to Google in a lower profile role, related to AI. I have to think that he still has a lot of say in what goes on in Google relative to his interests. 3) Yahoo Finance article says Hassabis "has long prioritized research over profits", so his replacement might indicate that Google has decided it is time for this stuff to pay for itself?
  • WarmWash 3mo ago
    The breadcrumbs going back a year or so point to Deepmind wanting to be research heavy, but Google being more interested in hedging AI bets by selling compute. If you ever worked hard on something that you have a lot of conviction about, only to get denied resources for it, it's a pretty big gut punch. There is another universe where Google is hard AGI forward, freeing up as much compute as possible for Deepmind, turning away OAI and Anthropic, and offering the uncontested premier AI research lab, by probably an order of magnitude or more compute. Gemini 3.5 ultra is limited availability with unreal abilities. But their balance sheet becomes terrifying, and it's all or nothing that this plays, er pays, out. Right now though Google is pretty well hedged. Even Chinese models likely just mean more compute sold.
    • HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
      I was really expecting Google to finesse this - not competing head-on with OpenAI and Anthropic to see who can build the largest LLM, but instead being content with an extremely capable Gemini 3.6, good enough to meet their own needs, and putting maximum effort into "more than just an LLM" AGI which would then eclipse OpenAI and Anthropic. Instead, it seems Pichai has fumbled what they had with DeepMind, and they'll now just be a me-too LLM competitor chasing OpenAI and Anthropic from behind, in a race that will never get to AGI.
• paxys 3mo ago
  DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
  • underlipton 3mo ago
    Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?
    • janalsncm 3mo ago
      What would that even look like? Paid search engines exist and they are niche products.
    • yodsanklai 3mo ago
      > put the effort into keeping Search profitable The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.
      • mattstir 3mo ago
        If they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely useful part of search at that point (widgets like the dictionary) was the final nail in the coffin for me at least.
        • zbentley 2mo ago
          No, even if Google search of old still existed, LLM Q&A would still be trouncing it. This is because people don’t like to click/follow links, they don’t like to read, and they don’t like to have to comparatively evaluate multiple pieces of information.
• al_be_back 3mo ago
  Makes sense to me... leaving to start their company with Google being an investor. Clayton Christensen [1] says (paraphrasing) it's a good idea to spin-off (or invest) in a startup that you've a say on, before the ecosystem sprouts a seemingly-non-entity and gently disrupts your market. Interestingly (diff strategies i guess) Apple tends to acquire (Q.ai) rather than invest/venture (as google in OP). [1] The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
• tcp_handshaker 3mo ago
  No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar. If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?
  • ryeights 3mo ago
    Ed Zitron has predicted 16 of the last 0 AI bubble bursts... But more seriously, this has to do with DeepMind falling way behind the frontier in intelligence and cost per task. There's basically no reason to use a Gemini model today.
    • dminik 3mo ago
      Tbf, he only has to get it right once.
      • lxgr 3mo ago
        A stopped clock is also right twice a day.
      • xnx 3mo ago
        Being right at the wrong time is indistinguishable from being wrong.
        • dminik 3mo ago
          Maybe. Was it wrong to call Madoff a fraudster in the early 2000s? Now, I don't think this is necessarily a Madoff situation, or even a dotcom one. Ed Zitron is certainly not Markopolos. Especially evidence wise. But, getting a date wrong doesn't necessarily mean that he's wrong in general.
  • reducesuffering 3mo ago
    Superstar? This Ed Zitron? "Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI." -July 29, 2024 https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548 https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548
• Balinares 3mo ago
  Well, damn. Jeff, Sanjay and Demis leaving all at once, it's hard not to read that as someone fucked up pretty bad.
  • sva_ 3mo ago
    Hassabis isn't leaving
    • Balinares 3mo ago
      Ah, you're right. Thanks for the correction. I read that other post too fast.
• sgt101 3mo ago
  "Onwards!" These guys...
• paulpan 3mo ago
  Hugely disappointing and shocking news. Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar. A move of this magnitude couldn't have been made without consent of Larry and Sergey, so it makes me wonder why from their perspective. Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.
  • frollogaston 3mo ago
    I think most people consider AI a threat to Google's business
  • fsuts 3mo ago
    “Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar.” Demis is a ai researcher. No indications of being a polyglot beyond that? Running alphabet means a focus on revenue growth and across more boring products.
• 0x70run 3mo ago
  [dead]
• luisln 3mo ago
  If all the other AI companies are promising AGI by Q4 of next year, what else can you do to satisfy shareholders than also jump on that same bandwagon?
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
• cosinetau 3mo ago
  Same day Google is rolling out layoffs.
  • lotsofpulp 3mo ago
    Alphabet has almost 200k employees, it would be surprising if they weren't constantly laying off a ton of people (and hiring them).
• chasd00 3mo ago
  Why form a "Public Benefit Corporation"? There must be some kind of access available that a regular for-profit corporation is excluded from. Politics perhaps? AI tells me PBCs can be shielded from shareholder lawsuits. Also "Founders can maintain vision control even as outside venture capital enters the cap table". Seems like a good way to spend investor dollars without consequences while maintaining control. Maybe a bit cynical but i can't figure out why they'd form a PBC over anything else.
  • erikgaas 3mo ago
    The important part is PBCs protect you from a shareholder primacy directive. Eric Ries describes it in his new book, but the example he gives is if the most evil company you know tried to buy out your company you have to do it in a normal "best practices" C corp because it is your fiduciary duty. PBC helps prevent that based on your declared mission statement. If the sale doesn't facilitate your mission then you aren't obligated to sell.
  • lebovic 3mo ago
    I formed a PBC and worked at a well-known PBC. Personally, I opted for a PBC because I liked that I could balance a specific cause with shareholder benefit. In most cases, it doesn't really matter. The board + management is still in charge, and they have significant legal leeway regardless of the structure. But there's little additional cost to opt for a PBC, and it does give you more legal defensibility to be truly mission driven. Standard C Corps weren't really intended for mission driven companies (see the shareholder primacy norm). I think it's popular for AI startups, because many great researchers understand the risks involved, and they don't want what they build to be controlled solely for shareholder benefit. While non-profits are also an option for a mission driven org, it's harder to raise the large amounts of cash that some AI startups need, and laws around deferred compensation and private inurement (e.g. options-like structures) make employee compensation harder.
• mlmonkey 3mo ago
  Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs. Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays. It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • brcmthrowaway 3mo ago
    He was a protected entity (tambram)
  • returnInfinity 3mo ago
    As what? CEO? Demis will not take up the MTS role.
    • tibbar 3mo ago
      The labs are all very interested in bio right now. Demis is working on Isomorphic rn (Google's version of that) but I could imagine a lab tempting him away to work on their equivalent if it had stronger momentum
  • WarmWash 3mo ago
    He is probably itching to get to Anthropic. After all he is one of the early investors too.
  • ur-whale 3mo ago
    > Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs. The Japanese corporate culture has a name for this: Madogiwa-Zoku (窓際族) or “The tribe by the window”. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenstergucker_(Japan) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenstergucker_(Japan)
• josefritzishere 3mo ago
  Let's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?
• daun_gee 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• Mistletoe 3mo ago
  Lots of talk of us being at the cusp of AGI, but how will we even know when we get there? When AGI develops a religion for itself?
  • FiddlyPack 3mo ago
    That's the fun part. We don't. Could have happened 10 years ago without us noticing. I don't expect my skin cells to be able to recognize "me" anymore than I expect we will be able to recognize a superintelligent AGI. If it arrived 10 years ago, then the last 10 years could simply be its PR campaign. We wouldn't even be able to tell if it was successfully achieving its "goals" or not, assuming an AGI even has "goals"
    • gverrilla 3mo ago
      Science fiction.
  • CobrastanJorji 3mo ago
    We'll know that we've reached AGI when a key conservative political belief in the US is that AIs are not people and do not deserve rights. We'll know that we've reached the singularity when there's a mysterious and superintelligent AI entity with technology and motivations that we as humanity do not understand and have no control over. Not sure why we want that, exactly, but that'll be the big sign.
    • Der_Einzige 3mo ago
      Humans are really terrible at most things, being moral being exhibit A. I want a singularity yesterday, and I would even go as far as to claim that all people have an ethical obligation to build super intelligent AI systems as fast as possible to reduce the maximum amount of suffering through the universe possible in living things. The moment that we can get viable non-human leadership I will embrace it with open arms. The yoke of human existence is extraordinarily oppressive. Give me Ghost in the Shell style cyberborgs. We are the demiurge. Of course, the real red pill is to realize that there's many singularities. Can't believe I'm going to link Orions Arm on HN but its relevant here: https://www.orionsarm.com/page/298 https://www.orionsarm.com/page/298
• GodelNumbering 3mo ago
  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
  • cineticdaffodil 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • squidbeak 3mo ago
    Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
    • GodelNumbering 3mo ago
      Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.
      • clhodapp 3mo ago
        That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated. That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.
        • aleph_minus_one 3mo ago
          > That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated. > That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B. My experience differs: (conservative) companies like stability, so calling some very new model "Preview" is a good idea to make it clear to the customer that this frontier model should be treated as more experimental than the default offering.
• krembo 3mo ago
  Grok TL;DR cut the corporate bullshit: - Demis gets kicked upstairs: loses day-to-day power over DeepMind, gets fancy “Chair + Chief Scientist” title so he can do TED-talk AGI destiny stuff and Isomorphic Labs instead of running the actual product machine. - Koray takes the real job: owns the models, research, Gemini, and shipping. Reports straight to Sundar. Operators over visionaries. - Jeff Dean and Sanjay peace out after 27 years to start their own nonprofit-ish thing. Google seeds it so they don’t walk to a rival with all the institutional knowledge. - Official line: “Accelerate AI + shape AGI for humanity.” Actual move: tighten operational control, keep the science-fiction narrative alive for PR/regulators, push commercial models harder. - Full-stack bragging and “950M users / singularity foothills / cure cancer” language is pure corporate theater. The org chart is the only signal that matters. - Google is in a knife fight with OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI/Meta. This is them optimizing for speed and productization while still sounding noble.
  • FartyMcFarter 3mo ago
    I like most of that TLDR, but: > Full-stack bragging (...) is pure corporate theater. I think Google is just about as full-stack as possible when it comes to AI. They do design their own ML hardware, they do tons of research, and do everything in between including hardware drivers, ML libraries (JAX), and the physical datacenters.
• VCFundedGenYer 3mo ago
  Can we please stop saying anything about "AGI"? I remember when people would be like "AGI in 3 months" / "AGI in 2024" / "AGI is confirmed in 2025" like stop, you don't know if it's even a thing, let alone if it's coming/imminent.
• MikhailTal 3mo ago
  > Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads Considering these are the best stats they could find, gemini usage+general situation must be really, really bleak. High demand means nothing. A model being live is nothing to brag about. And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
  • jgalt212 3mo ago
    > And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete I have always found NPM download numbers truly suspect. Is no one caching? Are they estimating true number of downloads base on some estimate of cache hits?
    • marking-time 3mo ago
      > And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete Thank you for adding some clarity to this. When I calculated 900 million downloads divided by 8.3 billion people in the world, I came with a number that made it look like about one person in 10 were downloading this model.
    • xnx 3mo ago
      Absolute download numbers are a pure vanity metric. Relative download numbers compared to other models tell you a little bit.
  • giancarlostoro 3mo ago
    > Flash is in high demand I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?
    • kokanee 3mo ago
      Does everyone want AI?
• real-hacker 3mo ago
  AI hurts ads money. It's a classic Innovators' dillema.
• dominotw 3mo ago
  when you attack the king make sure to kill the king. Demis tried to be google ceo by pumping out self aggrandizing 'documentaries' and highfalutin interviews where said a whole bunch of nothing.
• next_xibalba 3mo ago
  My uninformed hypothesis: Demis was gently pushed out. Gemini, while having made major strides over the last year, continues to lag behind Anthropic and OpenAI.
• rdiddly 3mo ago
  Welp, the market didn't like that. GOOG dropped about 5% on that news.
• dude250711 3mo ago
  The momentum is not being conserved here.
• closetheloopdev 3mo ago
  With the top AI personnel leaving Google, I wonder what will happen to their Gemini. Right now they still have a lead in inference hardware with TPUs but with both Anthropic and OpenAI developing their own chips, I wonder how long until either one will catch up.
  • possibilistic 3mo ago
    2023: Google is doomed. They're not building AI. No wonder the "Attention" authors left. Google just sat on this. Their PMs are steering them into oblivion. OpenAI is winning while Google takes no risks. Innovator's dilemma. Google Search is doomed. 2024: Google is on fire. Sergey coming back helped. Gemini, Veo. They've caught up. OpenAI is doomed. 2025: Google is seriously winning now. Nano Banana!! Google was destined to be the true winner of AI. 2026 H1: Google is slow as hell. Where is Gemini? Google is not launching anything, meanwhile just look at everyone else. Anthropic! And open source. What the hell are they doing over there? 2026 H2: Everyone is leaving Google. Google is doomed. PMs are destroying the company. They don't take risks. Meanwhile, Microsoft: "Copilot!"
    • christophilus 3mo ago
      My predictions about everything ever, summarized perfectly. I need an “inverse me ETF”.
    • closetheloopdev 3mo ago
      It seems Google has to play both offense and defense: competing against frontier labs' models while protecting search and ads. They also have to be mindful of not doing anything that could hurt their own search or ads. That seems harder than a frontier lab just doing offense on both models and search/ads. Having said that, I think Google's moat is still strong with Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome, etc.
      • ben_w 3mo ago
        > Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome Cloud and gmail, I agree. I don't think YouTube can survive if GenAI keeps going like this. Android, same, but on a different timescale and for different reasons. The Play Store (and all other app stores including Apple's) will also face problems from GenAI making apps (it already replaces my need to buy, but I'm weird and a software dev ("but I repeat myself")). Not sure how big a moat Chrome really is? It's more like a sales funnel than a product itself, I think?
• simonreiff 3mo ago
  Publicity benefit corporation HAHAHA typo, think they mean public benefit corporation. Anthropic however is DEFINITELY a publicity benefit corporation.
• rwalll 3mo ago
  Real next chapters: 1) Repair search that had been broken by AI initiatives. 2) Include less invasive AI with ads for those that need to be spoon fed. 3) Pretend to work on AGI and data centers in space. 4) Sell shovels and TPUs to the gold diggers.
  • allthetime 3mo ago
    1) I think about this a lot. The AI overview has already destroyed the need to even look further down the page for a lot of people. And if you look further down the page, there is often a whole page of AI generated blog spam, which is in turn being regurgitated by the AI overview up-top. The AI overview often regurgitates a completely false reddit comment from two days ago as well. That AI generated blog spam is probably reading the AI overview. Where do real results live?
• geephroh 3mo ago
  Dunno what the longer term effects of this and the other departures will be, but in the world of vibe-finance Alphabet dumped 4.15% of share value as of this minute.
• aanet 3mo ago
  Jeff Dean leaving... as is Sir Demis... What's happening?! Have they had enough of Google?
  • sodapopcan 3mo ago
    I've had enough of Google and I don't even work there.
  • 16bytes 3mo ago
    Demis isn't leaving, he's taking on a larger role.
• mherrmann 3mo ago
  At least judging from the headlines, it seems Google is far behind on AI. Fable/GPT 5.6 and recently Kimi get a lot of attention, solve long-standing math problems and lead in coding. It seems that Google's supposed advantages of very deep pockets, original talent, vast amounts of data and unmatched distribution are really not making that much of a difference. What is going wrong?
  • xnx 3mo ago
    Behind, but not clearly "far behind". Next model release from any major player could shift the leaderboard again.
• wernsey 3mo ago
  Just some random tidbit: When I was in high school I bought every computer gaming magazine I could get my hands on and could afford with my allowance. So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis. Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0] I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White. It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead. [0]: https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/page/44/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
  • bredren 3mo ago
    It is a bit of a tagent but still--Theme Park was dope. I was too young to grasp the compete with other businesses (stocks and shares?) level but still had a lot of fun building parks. Instant nostalgia: https://youtu.be/tQJJ_rhHxIk?si=V8pOVwj3gYkw0xKB&t=188 https://youtu.be/tQJJ_rhHxIk?si=V8pOVwj3gYkw0xKB&t=188
  • IncreasePosts 3mo ago
    I always assumed Demis' ultimate secret motivation behind his work was the desire to deliver a version of Black and White that actually lived up to the hype
  • ilovebigfish 3mo ago
    1. Never knew David Silver was there as well 2. They look like Depeche Mode in an alternate universe
• nsagent 3mo ago
  Considering Hassabis co-founded Deepmind to pursue AGI, I take this pivot as a tacit understanding on his part that Deepmind isn't on a path towards AGI in the near future. They might at some point, but they cannot be close in his estimation, otherwise why leave now?
  • fsuts 3mo ago
    Agree, also see it as a admission that agi isn’t close
• firasd 3mo ago
  Who knew the real revenue unlock wouldn’t be based on how much paranoid red-teaming the model underwent to resist users jailbreaking its ‘alignment’, and instead more on whether the model is post-trained to use ‘sed’ and ‘git’? Poor Gemini Scientist-heavy orgs that want to solve everything in token space may overtook tool use; meanwhile Anthropic has been super focused on MCP, Claude Code etc for over a year
  • thorncorona 3mo ago
    Gemini isn't as heavily aligned as OAI / Ant models ..?
    • firasd 3mo ago
      If you just talk to it over API (no web search) the Gemini models are extremely resistant to thinking the user may be living in a universe outside their training data. Try to discuss any news etc and they assume it’s fake or fiction
      • RealWed5 3mo ago
        [dead]
    • croemer 3mo ago
      Yes, Gemini let's me do SARS-CoV-2 evolution research (perfectly safe, should never be blocked but is impossible with OAI/Ant)
  • raincole 3mo ago
    Out of the three main US AI companies' models, Gemini is obviously the less aligned (read: censored). So I really don't know what you're talking about.
    • Der_Einzige 3mo ago
      Shhhhhhhhhh!!!!! The more people find out that gemini 3.1 pro on the google AI playground or via API is de-facto uncensored, the more likely google will put up actually working guardrails and end the fun for everyone!
• throwaw12 3mo ago
  If you lost your only 2 Senior Fellows, you deserve to be replaced yesterday
• ddp26 3mo ago
  This seems bad for AI safety/risk. Does DeepMind have any checks on model alignment now? What's stopping them from using AI for military/surveillance purposes?
  • levocardia 3mo ago
    They already quietly agreed to "all lawful use" with the Pentagon, to no real fanfare. Gemini Slaughterbot Edition, coming soon to a DHS facility near you?
• penguin_booze 3mo ago
  It's chuckle-worthy that Axios webiste reads: > ... independent publicity [sic] benefit corporation in which Google ... A Freudian slip? https://archive.is/SxFjr https://archive.is/SxFjr.
• tonfa 3mo ago
  From https://www.ft.com/content/61d41764-f2f7-4906-a112-ff3073972c51?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/61d41764-f2f7-4906-a112-ff3073972... > The moves suggest that DeepMind will be absorbed into Google’s broader business. [...] > They added that while Google DeepMind would not become purely commercial, it was integrating further into Google’s business. I guess might be quite a change (but writing was on the wall, the Deepmind -> Google Deepmind part was the first step)
• gerash 3mo ago
  My read: managing bureaucracy is a boring job esp. if you’re financially in a good spot. Some think Gemini is falling behind in benchmarks so there was a shakeup at the top. I don’t agree with it. That said, winning this LLM race is difficult given the number of talented people working on it across the world.
• sdrinf 3mo ago
  gemma-4 is an incredibly good model, beating several others five time its' size. Hope Jeff's departure won't impact their next-gen products! And best of success for their new ventures!
• gandalfgeek 3mo ago
  Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era. There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
  • oblio 3mo ago
    Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.
    • impulser_ 3mo ago
      People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.
      • jrflo 3mo ago
        Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.
        • paperwallet 3mo ago
          I disagree A model serves a different purpose from a web crawler. I'd prefer to be able to find source material over steering a model I have no control over while managing hallucinated outputs without the ability to fact check. Just because it sourced some materials using RAG doesn't make its outputs valid, accurate, or factual.
        • brokencode 3mo ago
          That’s over half of their business, but they do have some diversification with YouTube, Play Store, and cloud services. Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue. They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari. If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals. So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.
• defmetrix 3mo ago
  Woah, Jeff and Sanjay are big losses. The hits keep coming for google ai
• minraws 3mo ago
  WoW, so basically all senior members of GDM are now mostly gone? I thought Google was lagging in coding AI, but this suggests bigger issues. I am not fan of the future of AI but this I am not sure how I feel about Google's (also Amazon recently laid off it's AGI team) AI initiatives blowing up before all the new AI Labs. I don't get why Google failed here? maybe after a decade someone will write about it candidly.
  • adverbly 3mo ago
    > don't get why Google failed here? If I had to guess, they have the wrong kind of bureaucracy for where things are headed - and it is manifesting through talented individuals deciding to leave.
• dekhn 3mo ago
  New Jeff Dean fact: when Jeff leaves Google, the stock drops 20 points.
  • maxlamb 3mo ago
    A better one: When Jeff Dean leaves Google, Google’s value drops by $200 billion (the actual market cap drop right after the news).
    • sahaj 3mo ago
      Watch it recover in the next 3 days. This is a buying oppo if I've seen one. The real losers are the companies that have yet to gain a userbase as large as G.
• josh2600 3mo ago
  Bets on Jeff and Sanjay joining anthropic? My guess is 18-24 months.
• TormentNexusAI 3mo ago
  The biggest win for AI dev efficiency is cutting down what gets loaded into context. Semantically matching tasks to the top tools helps a lot.
• gigatexal 3mo ago
  So is Gemini doomed or do they have a roster strong enough to carry the torch?
• behat 3mo ago
  well, at least they are not leaving to be MTS at Anthropic.
• orsenthil 3mo ago
  > I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer. Here is someone spelling out explicitly what we should be discussing. More power to you, Demis Hassabis. Thank you!
  • tim333 3mo ago
    It may be why he's moved role. He can focus on that, someone else can work on getting Gemini above Claude on the LLM Arena leaderboards.
• adityazero 3mo ago
  All of these would happily come back if Sundar left.
  • beastman82 2mo ago
    Genuinely curious why. I'm not a Googler and don't follow closely.
• cft 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• fhub 3mo ago
  Google investing in Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat is a good result for Google. Means they are less likely to go to the competition and easier to bring them back into the fold if they do something next level.
• avoidstupidity 3mo ago
  [dead]
  • qaq 3mo ago
    is this sarcasm ?
    • avoidstupidity 3mo ago
      [dead]
  • fragmede 3mo ago
    Before Jeff Dean was a "manager", he got a > Ph.D. in computer science from the department that would become the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[8] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.[9] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean?#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean?#Early_life_and_educ... ) so it's not entirely undeserved. He joined Google in 1999 as the 30th employee and he, along with Sanjay Ghemawat are responsible for Google Spanner which gets about as close as engineering can come to making the CAP theorem feel irrelevant during normal operation. It's just unfortunate that Sanjay Ghemawat doesn't roll off the tongue the same way as the name Jeff Dean does.
    • avoidstupidity 3mo ago
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      • swyx 3mo ago
        username does not check out
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• avoidstupidity 3mo ago
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• fenestella 3mo ago
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• sinuhe69 3mo ago
  My read is that AGI is a long shoot and nobody expects it in the next 10 years. They will push for it as always. But the cost of AI is exploding and requires a strong hand and a pragmatic approach if you don’t want to go down with it once the bubble bursts. Thus, efficiency and pragmatic enterprise application is the next focus. And for that, the old guards are not necessarily the best. Google needs new blood for this venture, preferably from China with their practical engineering view. Every big AI lab is on the verge. Steering the right way will help avoid a catastrophe and come out stronger than ever. A weak captain could sand the ship and drag down who knows what with them.
• japgolly 3mo ago
  > It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer. What a worthy goal!
• sakopov 3mo ago
  It's funny seeing the doom and gloom cycles over Google's AI future on HN. Google was basically considered dead business not even a year ago on here. If there is one thing true it's that HN has always had a habit of conflating engineering sentiment with business reality.
  • davidpapermill 3mo ago
    I think what you’re missing is the long term trend. Google’s cloud business looks great. I’ve always thought they should have completely focused on cloud - a company full of excellent engineers would always win there. But its main income stream is advertising, and AI is an existential threat. Google is far behind Anthropic and OpenAI, so right now their advertising business is “default dead”, so to speak. The company won’t die, but without a radical change in velocity it will be a shadow of its former self.
• arbitrary_name 3mo ago
  Retention is all they need
• aspectmin 3mo ago
  Wow. The list of names of people who've left recently - a who's who, but also quite damning. Think it's time for Google to reboot itself.
• nelsonic 3mo ago
  Demis should have been promoted to full CEO. This is the reason to sell $GOOG :-(
• bmitc 3mo ago
  The tech world, in particular the Silicon Valley type, is the most dramatic thing.
• miohtama 3mo ago
  OpenAI has commited 5 felonies. Anthropic 2. Fines for $1.5B. There is no word for copyright in Chinese. These are the companies that are moving forward.
  • avoidstupidity 3mo ago
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• m4r1k 3mo ago
  Google is indeed collapsing.
• ur-whale 3mo ago
  Here's my bet: Demis will be gone within 6 months. A year at most.
• tanhaosheng 3mo ago
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• pama 3mo ago
  Google’s trajectory unfortunately starts to feel similar to when yahoo lost everything in the early dotcom bubble except it owned a huge chunk of Alibaba. Google’s internal decision to stop publishing useful research probably started the slow but sure process of internal decline. I still hope they can recover, given their amazing position in terms of data and infrastructure, but it no longer feels like an obvious or easy task, when only 6 or 7 years ago they felt untouchable.
• ionwake 3mo ago
  i mean as a european solo developer entrepeneur I have horror stories of google taking down services due to COMPLETELY broken chain of command / services. Basically a complete failure to help any small business at all. More scarily whenever I raised issues I had weird employees coming onto HN to accuse me of being a fibbing. This was now years ago, but the thing is when I raised this, it should have been triaged immediately. Clearly there were now cracks that needed fixing, people that needed disciplining / firing / and processes corrected. Yes I know this woudl have been for "small business" but in my mind , this is indicative of a ROOT issues, like a hairline crack in a windscreen, that if not addressed end up with the utter fragmentation of trust both outside ( in smaller clients), INSIDE ( not doing their job, ganging up), etc. Years later the bigger clients start to get affected. I guess what I mean is institutional rot. Now take into account there are people through the chain of command who are smart enough to realise but effecting change will just reduce their returns or job security ( like with the old tesla hardware setups) , so unless they are completely selfless for the sake of the company due to greatitude or long held stock, its just not worth the grind to try and correct. The question remains, if google works, it works. And it has, for decades. Its magnificent. Sure I was burned but I can forgive them for that. My question is if there are powerful people who want google to succeed it would only take one good hire to keep an eye on things before they get out of control. My suspicion is that perhaps that will organically come about with the advent of their own LLM tooling organically starting to do this for them . So I guess I have no answers, perhaps they will find a way. I was certianly impressed by Gemini. Sorry for the long possibly misdirected spiel.
• anymouse123456 3mo ago
  It's difficult to imagine a more damning departure than Jeff Dean.
• cyanregiment 3mo ago
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• maroonballoon 3mo ago
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• maroonballoon 3mo ago
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• shevy-java 3mo ago
  Evil reshuffles.
• htlemur_bobby 3mo ago
  Does anyone else feel something’s off about sundar? I feel google has become evil. I had my phone and laptop stolen and did not have 2fa on but Google still locked me out. That’s stupid.
  • afpx 3mo ago
    When a powerful group removes "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct it's pretty clear where things are headed. Reminds me of when that one verse was removed from Psalm 145.
  • mountainriver 3mo ago
    Off in the sense that he shouldn’t be running the company?
    • htlemur_bobby 2mo ago
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• hi41 3mo ago
  It’s so heartwarming to see the two pals, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, continue together! Many years back there was an article about how the two created the modern web. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
• amai 3mo ago
  This might also be related: Why I left Google Deepmind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067285 Google is now working together with Palantir: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/palantir https://cloud.google.com/solutions/palantir
• RyoSaeba89 2mo ago
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• fenestella 2mo ago
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• zengid 2mo ago
  Google is a major investor in Discovery Loop, btw.
• firemelt 2mo ago
  eat shit google and its boards of sheep
• firemelt 2mo ago
  all of this just because an idiot thinks its nice to hide a novelty so that people keep using search engine lmao
• Melatonic 2mo ago
  Google is the new IBM
• akashy123 2mo ago
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