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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 sta
by atleastoptimal 2mo 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 2mo agoI've always thought this as well.
- abakker 2mo agoWouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?
- jaccola 2mo agoWhat is anticompetitive about it? The comment above is literally claiming they’ve been outcompeted.
- SpicyLemonZest 2mo agoNot 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 2mo agoyou 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.
- SpicyLemonZest 2mo agoIt's a notoriously double edged sword. When you create huge absolute return incentives, you get things like the Airtable acquisition, where everyone's sad that you built a $1.2B company because some investor at some point mistakenly thought it was an $11B company.
- abakker 2mo agoYeah, that makes sense. I suppose the flip side of all of this is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have made a lot of money relative to their spending. Google is probably just trying to be more prudent. But, AI so far is a money spending contest, more than a money making one.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2mo agoThere is no other way to describe the Gemini 3.5 pro delay than as a complete and unmitigated disaster. It's a huge company. It's unlikely there is any one person to blame (and entirely possible he has none of it). But things need to change.
- sigmoid10 2mo agoGoogle was always at the frontier of real research, but has been abysmal at shipping good products (at least since Sundar). The core company is run for margins and interest rates by the business people nowadays.
- mynameisjonny_ 2mo agoGemini 3.1-pro was genuinely SOTA for a few weeks, in fairness
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- DannyBee 2mo agoSo they are fixing this by letting go of the people who were best at the research side, and therefore will have no problem converting "nothing" into products anymore!
- tanh 2mo agoYeah. I’m guessing they’re behind the Chinese models in capability now
- chanux 2mo agoJust today my Pixel failed to do the right thing on "Set an alarm in 15 minutes" thanks to Gemini. This has worked reliably since Google Assistant was introduced.
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- jmyeet 2mo agoWe'll see if anyone gets to cash in on those. All you need is one down round and that gets wiped out. Or if the IPO gets delayed and disappoints then the stock can drop well before the lockouts expire. OpenAI and Anthropic are essentially offering Monopoly money in the hopes that one day you can exchange it for real money.
- tonfa 2mo ago> OpenAI and Anthropic are essentially offering Monopoly money in the hopes that one day you can exchange it for real money. I thought employees have already had opportunities to cash out (there's enough funding rounds for that). (Tho how much you can sell was limited, iirc to double digit millions...)
- xnx 2mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic have the freedom to do absolutely insane things like negligently hack other companies. It would be stock price suicide if anything even remotely happened with Google.
- VulgarExigency 2mo agoThere's no doubt in my mind that they set up the conditions for their models to escape the sandboxes. "haha oops our incredibly powerful models escaped we need 1 trillion more dollars and really this is yet another reason why no one else should be allowed to build this technology"
- IsTom 2mo agoIt might also be that the security sandbox was haphazardly vibeslopped together.
- frabcus 2mo agoHmm. And the AISI unintended model hacking yesterday was also just marketing for the British Government? At some point we have to all accept that powerful AI is most likely dangerous AI as well, almost by definition.
- pixl97 2mo ago"No, no, no" a person on Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube screams for the billionth time. "It's all marketing" as the terminator bots kick in the door and slaughter their families.
- overgard 2mo agoI think something that doesn't get talked about a lot is how bad most large tech companies are at creating new products, in general. Like, if you look at most big tech companies, they have their core offering that got them to be really large and rich, and a few other products that are somewhat successful, and then a really long tail of markets they try to enter and failed at, or projects that were modestly successful but got killed because they weren't game changers (RIP Google Reader). Most of the time when a large company does something new that succeeds, it's via an acquisition of a smaller company (ie, Google with Android or Meta with Instagram and Whatsapp) It's funny, because I think the company that's going to be best positioned coming out of this bubble is in fact google, because they have the expertise and the capital. But I honestly can't tell you right now what their AI product even is -- I've seen so many things go into the graveyard a few months after its launched that I'm utterly confused what their offering even is at this point.
- vineyardmike 2mo agoThe answer is far more benign. They getting a higher ROI renting their TPUs to Anthropic et al instead of performing training and serving their own models. Google cloud has insane backlog, and has rapidly expanded to satisfy it. While those DCs get built, they’re cannibalizing their own products for it. This makes sense because (1) they are investors in Anthropic, so they still win and (2) they can always catch up on model training later when the profit opportunity shifts, or abandon it if there is no way to recapture that value.
- WarmWash 2mo agoAwfully ironic that Google makes more money (probably an order or magnitude or so) from it's direct competitors than it does from a it's own product.
- jatins 2mo agoI don’t think so. If Kimi and Deepseek can launch models better than Gemini with much much lesser resources then it is increasingly looking like an organization issue at Google
- kccqzy 2mo agoNo I think you misunderstood GP’s comment. The idea (which I personally don’t agree with) was that Google didn’t have to have the best models; it just needed to have the best compute infrastructure, i.e. having TPUs and the software stack to use TPUs. It was a better use of money to develop compute infrastructure than to develop better models. Perhaps Gemini itself was resource-starved because Google liked to rent out TPUs to Anthropic instead. (Second-hand information: I heard that Mythos/Fable were trained on Google TPUs.)
- vineyardmike 2mo ago> Perhaps Gemini itself was resource-starved because Google liked to rent out TPUs to Anthropic instead. This was the core hypothesis.
- solenoid0937 2mo ago
- mrpopo 2mo ago> people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI People who truly care about becoming rich* DeepMind made enormous transformative discoveries, for instance in the world of protein folding. But that will just save human lives, not let CEOs fire their people to grab a larger piece of cake for themselves.
- logicchains 2mo agoIt's not a ML talent problem. You don't need to be a genius deep learning researcher to think "Hey, maybe if we massively throttle and degrade the quality of our model while still charging the same price, that might drive people away" (as happened with Gemini 2.5 Pro, the one model where Google really was SOTA). Google's likely been providing insufficient training compute to DeepMind the same way they've been nickel-and-diming their customers, funneling it all to Search instead because that's where the money comes from.
- underlipton 2mo agoIs that what's happening? Search has sucked for a while, and I'd just assumed it was partly because they'd been pushing compute to AI-related activities.
- cedws 2mo agoIs this not an apples-and-pears comparison? DeepMind is a research lab, not an LLM-pilled money furnace.
- majormajor 2mo agoThat was true early but OpenAI/Anthropic have done a ton of hiring over the past couple years at already-huge valuations, as much on the strength of big current base salary + equity, not just future increase speculation.
- solenoid0937 2mo agoEveryone knows there isn't a moat. No one joins OpenAI/Anthropic unless they think these companies will reach superintelligence. So most people joining believe their equity will 10-100x even from where it is today. (Coincidentally, the talent that believes we will reach AGI overlaps a lot with the best talent, which has a magnetic effect.)
- Bjorkbat 2mo agoOne theory I've been entertaining is that whenever GPT-3.5 came out a lot of people were talking about the "bitter lesson" and how scale was all we really needed to get to AGI. No need for any fancy tricks, just release a larger model trained on more data, by the time we released a hypothetical "GPT-5 sized" model we'd have AGI. Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been playing by this playbook of focusing on scale and training data, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic have done so well because they are likely doing much more interesting things to improve their models over time. It makes sense when you realize that one of Google's key strengths, besides talent, is that they have an incredible amount of data they can use for training due to being both the world's leading search engine as well as having all that video data from YouTube. Scaling the training data makes more sense to them than it does to Anthropic and OpenAI, who are both relatively data-disadvantaged. You can kind of see this when you look at the Gemini 3 scorecard when it came out (https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/gemini-3/ https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/g...) and notice that while it wasn't as good as Claude And GPT at coding, it scored higher on a bunch of other non-coding benchmarks, and I think the reason why is simply because of Google's data advantage. If true, I feel even more vindicated for believing that the "scale is all we need" narrative was bullshit.
- redox99 2mo agoOther than attention optimizations and other minor changes, the top Chinese models (which are way better than gemini) have basically the same architecture as GPT2. Of course RL is key for agentic workloads, but I'd say it's correct that progress has been mostly scaling models,adding more data and cleaning it better.
- aidis9136264 2mo agoGoogle has a ton of smart researchers trying all sorts of stuff. They didn’t really go all in on any one thing. They hedge their bets. But they suck at harnesses, developer tooling etc. their internal environment is very complex and an intern on a MacBook with codex can probably move faster than a seasoned deepmind engineer
- nolist_policy 2mo ago
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- deeviant 2mo agoI think it's just more about market incentive. At it's core, LLMs are bad for google's previous business model, which was to send you to as many sites 'good enough' for what you were looking for and plant Ad land mines along the way, in the search results and in the websites themselves. The new paradigm is you ask the llm a question, get the answer and cutout the middle man. (yes the answer may or may not be as good as the old google result, but for the sake of the argument lets say it is), Google was in danger of simply getting their arm cut off. so they focused on scaling so they could add LLMs to the search, which they largely have. You can't offer an opus like model on something as big as search (and which is offered for 'free'), so they focused on that model, and the infrastructure to run it, because they cannot afford to lose search. Meanwhile, they know the power of frontier models, they are working to have the infrastructure to be a huge player in them and I'm sure they will have a frontier capable model, eventually. They are playing a longer game, because they can, and I think it's going to work out very well for them.
- ralph84 2mo agoGoogle was offering researchers the Bell Labs/Xerox PARC model of comfortable budgets and pay but capped upside. And just like with Bell Labs and Xerox PARC the inventions at Google got productized elsewhere by people chasing the uncapped upside. Google would have been happy to keep LLMs in the research lab forever and never productize any of it. ChatGPT forced their hand.
- chermi 2mo agoThis makes a lot of sense to me. Probably doesn't explain everything but I could see it explaining a lot. Could also explain openai and anthropic delaying IPO (among other factors)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- SamvitJ 2mo agoFrom what I've heard, DeepMind's pay structure is not tied to Google compensation bands. Which means that top performers and key hires can be and are compensated extremely generously if the need calls for it. Another Alphabet subsidiary, Waymo, was well-known for doing this back in the day. But yes, even large RSU grants cannot replicate the upside of joining a company that increases in valuation 1000X, but to be fair, that is not a position the vast majority of OpenAI or Anthropic employees find themselves in either.
- elAhmo 2mo agoDeepMind is just a part of Google which does research stuff, and Google is a massive company that does loads of things but mostly sells ads. OpenAI and Anthropic are in a completely different game, their primary business model is making a product out of advancements that come out of DeepMind and co.
- firemelt 2mo agoits just simple as someone think he knows better than the engineer, anthropic and open ai doesn't have those people currently as they are private.