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> 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 Goog

by 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
    Crawler and Google Scholar and Google Books.
  - re-thc 3mo ago
    > Data centers, TPUs Those 2 are definitely NOT Google's strong points. Maybe by means of marketing. Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Equinix and many more are in the data center race. As for TPUs... Broadcom, Mediatek and all the other partners you hear less about are likely more important. Google just has the flashy media outreach.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler. Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other. A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.
  - WarmWash 3mo ago
    Google's weakness (well one of) is its total lack of cohesion. If the Google Books team could, they would sell access to that data in a heartbeat to boost their metrics.
    - vkou 3mo ago
      Which would be disastrous to the conglomorate as a whole. It's good for Google that they can't.
- basch 3mo ago
  As much as everyone wants to pay accomplished celebrities, all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves. A guard passing torch can be opportunity. Now, whether Google is the right environment to nurture, that’s its own quandary.
  - htrp 3mo ago
    >all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves They all leave to start new companies. Everyone on the Attention is all you need paper is at a startup.
- tuesdaynight 3mo ago
  It just depends on what are the most upvoted comments in HN. If they are bearish, you can be sure that you should be bullish in your investments. Meta was supposed to be broken as a business already, OpenAI and Anthropic would be failures as well.
- tim333 3mo ago
  Maybe they'll replace Hassabis with someone more focussed on beating OAI and Anthropic at chatbots? He always seemed a bit more into science, protein folding, new drugs and the like.
- sva_ 3mo ago
  I keep hearing this, but Hassabis did not leave Google/Alphabet. He merely changed from an administrative position to a more technical one.
  - mattm 3mo ago
    I've been following Demis a lot over the past year and he's alluded to this in interviews that basically he'd rather be doing research than leading a team. I know a lot of people have tagged him for being the next CEO of Google but he doesn't really want that. This role seems more aligned with what he actually wants to be doing.
- losvedir 3mo ago
  I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it. Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their position Apple, they do have a model, so they're not totally beholden to another for AI (like Apple is using Gemini!). But beyond that, for training the model they have YouTube, and of course they have their crawler and index, and the billions of users. I think HN skews coding agent focused, but that's not really a market for Google. I expect we will have coding specific models in the future, but Google wants a more general intelligence, to handle search queries, be able to connect email to chat to calendar and tasks, and so on. I don't find Gemini that much worse than the other big models for non-coding things.
  - B-Con 3mo ago
    I read Google's business incentive as "in it to not lose". AI is a new consumer endpoint and Google currently captures a lot of the endpoints. > I think HN skews coding agent focused 100% this. Coding agents are an interesting test ground, but the people who care about them are a fairly small bubble. I think they carry some of the overall AI weight because of the "what if you can vibe code your entire business" moonshot, but that's still orders of magnitude away and who knows if today's coding agents will actually be a stepping stone to that. If we ever get there it will likely be with entirely new domain languages.
  - computerdork 3mo ago
    Agreed:)
  - treis 3mo ago
    I hardly use Google search anymore in favor of ChatGPT. It's surely an existential threat. Google has a lot of layers of defense in Android, Chrome, Gmail/Accounts, and a stranglehold on internet ads. But at the center of that is search and search is being replaced by LLMs.
    - 3mo ago
- aroman 3mo ago
  Revenue, data, and stamina.
forrestthewoods 3mo ago
Whoa. So is Jeff effectively leaving Google to work on this new venture full time? Or is the venture a side project? It sounds like the former. I’m sure he’ll still have internal access as an advisor of sorts. But this feels like a seismic change. Much larger than I initially realized?
- clueless 3mo ago
  it's a new venture that he can then sell back to google, and continue his ongoing loop
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
omoikane 3mo ago
> Sanjay (who just joined Twitter) Clarification: this comment is saying Sanjay Ghemawat joined Twitter as a user recently (new account @Sanjay_Ghemawat as of July 2026), as opposed to Sanjay working for Twitter the company.
- worldsavior 3mo ago
  Such bad wording wow.
  - janalsncm 3mo ago
    I mean in the previous paragraph it says they’re creating a company. And is Twitter even hiring anymore?
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - effseven 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - kilpikaarna 3mo ago
      It’s called X now, but OP could’ve said ”signed up for”, not ”joined”.
Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
> It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion. It think the vast majority is what the decision to leave says about the overall sentiment at Google, not the value of these two individuals.
- etruong42 3mo ago
  It also goes to explain why comp is so high for executives. Executives leaving may also leave a terrible impression to the market. To be clear, even if this is an accurate observation, I am not arguing in favor of high executive pay.
oliver236 3mo ago
you mean x, right? just to fully understand

by xnx 3mo ago

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
  Crawler and Google Scholar and Google Books.
- re-thc 3mo ago
  > Data centers, TPUs Those 2 are definitely NOT Google's strong points. Maybe by means of marketing. Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Equinix and many more are in the data center race. As for TPUs... Broadcom, Mediatek and all the other partners you hear less about are likely more important. Google just has the flashy media outreach.
CamperBob2 3mo ago
Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler. Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other. A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  Google's weakness (well one of) is its total lack of cohesion. If the Google Books team could, they would sell access to that data in a heartbeat to boost their metrics.
  - vkou 3mo ago
    Which would be disastrous to the conglomorate as a whole. It's good for Google that they can't.
basch 3mo ago
As much as everyone wants to pay accomplished celebrities, all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves. A guard passing torch can be opportunity. Now, whether Google is the right environment to nurture, that’s its own quandary.
- htrp 3mo ago
  >all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves They all leave to start new companies. Everyone on the Attention is all you need paper is at a startup.
tuesdaynight 3mo ago
It just depends on what are the most upvoted comments in HN. If they are bearish, you can be sure that you should be bullish in your investments. Meta was supposed to be broken as a business already, OpenAI and Anthropic would be failures as well.
tim333 3mo ago
Maybe they'll replace Hassabis with someone more focussed on beating OAI and Anthropic at chatbots? He always seemed a bit more into science, protein folding, new drugs and the like.
sva_ 3mo ago
I keep hearing this, but Hassabis did not leave Google/Alphabet. He merely changed from an administrative position to a more technical one.
- mattm 3mo ago
  I've been following Demis a lot over the past year and he's alluded to this in interviews that basically he'd rather be doing research than leading a team. I know a lot of people have tagged him for being the next CEO of Google but he doesn't really want that. This role seems more aligned with what he actually wants to be doing.
losvedir 3mo ago
I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it. Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their position Apple, they do have a model, so they're not totally beholden to another for AI (like Apple is using Gemini!). But beyond that, for training the model they have YouTube, and of course they have their crawler and index, and the billions of users. I think HN skews coding agent focused, but that's not really a market for Google. I expect we will have coding specific models in the future, but Google wants a more general intelligence, to handle search queries, be able to connect email to chat to calendar and tasks, and so on. I don't find Gemini that much worse than the other big models for non-coding things.
- B-Con 3mo ago
  I read Google's business incentive as "in it to not lose". AI is a new consumer endpoint and Google currently captures a lot of the endpoints. > I think HN skews coding agent focused 100% this. Coding agents are an interesting test ground, but the people who care about them are a fairly small bubble. I think they carry some of the overall AI weight because of the "what if you can vibe code your entire business" moonshot, but that's still orders of magnitude away and who knows if today's coding agents will actually be a stepping stone to that. If we ever get there it will likely be with entirely new domain languages.
- computerdork 3mo ago
  Agreed:)
- treis 3mo ago
  I hardly use Google search anymore in favor of ChatGPT. It's surely an existential threat. Google has a lot of layers of defense in Android, Chrome, Gmail/Accounts, and a stranglehold on internet ads. But at the center of that is search and search is being replaced by LLMs.
  - 3mo ago
aroman 3mo ago
Revenue, data, and stamina.

forrestthewoods 3mo ago

Whoa. So is Jeff effectively leaving Google to work on this new venture full time? Or is the venture a side project? It sounds like the former. I’m sure he’ll still have internal access as an advisor of sorts. But this feels like a seismic change. Much larger than I initially realized?

clueless 3mo ago
it's a new venture that he can then sell back to google, and continue his ongoing loop

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

omoikane 3mo ago

> Sanjay (who just joined Twitter) Clarification: this comment is saying Sanjay Ghemawat joined Twitter as a user recently (new account @Sanjay_Ghemawat as of July 2026), as opposed to Sanjay working for Twitter the company.

worldsavior 3mo ago
Such bad wording wow.
- janalsncm 3mo ago
  I mean in the previous paragraph it says they’re creating a company. And is Twitter even hiring anymore?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - effseven 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - kilpikaarna 3mo ago
    It’s called X now, but OP could’ve said ”signed up for”, not ”joined”.

Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago

> It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion. It think the vast majority is what the decision to leave says about the overall sentiment at Google, not the value of these two individuals.

etruong42 3mo ago
It also goes to explain why comp is so high for executives. Executives leaving may also leave a terrible impression to the market. To be clear, even if this is an accurate observation, I am not arguing in favor of high executive pay.

oliver236 3mo ago

you mean x, right? just to fully understand