12 ms·
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 spi
by GodelNumbering 2mo 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 2mo ago[dead]
- squidbeak 2mo agoGemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
- GodelNumbering 2mo agoCorrect, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.
- clhodapp 2mo agoThat's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.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 2mo 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 That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.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.
- clhodapp 2mo agoThat's fine, but it should still have the same technical availability level
- ethbr1 2mo agoThe problem at Google is their (lacking) process for Preview -> GA. Maybe it's a consequence of their rigorousness around SRE, but it doesn't seem like there's a plausible and efficient path for that to happen. Ergo, the only competitive options from Google are ever-Preview products.
- clhodapp 2mo agoYup. Adopting a month-old Postgres release is quite aggressive. It's much more prudent to start considering adoption after it's had six to twelve months of battle testing. Adopting a month-old AI model version for new development is the default industry expectation right now. Adopting a six month old model is a recipe for having to migrate to a new one almost immediately, when it hits EOL.
- ragall 2mo agoThe process was, as we were informally told during orientation, that "Preview" means some SVP thinks this has a chance of going over the minimum threshold of 200M worldwide users and is willing to put his weight behind that product, and "GA" means the product has gone over that threshold and will be "supported" until it goes back below the threshold at which point competing SVPs will start sharpening their knives, preparing to stick them in the back of the SVP that is currently in charge of the product.
- notatoad 2mo agoDoes that mean anything at all? They released it. Customers paid for it. Sticking a preview label on it doesn’t change that it was released
- npn 2mo agobtw, GA usually means it is suitable for production, and available globally. the last time a gemini model was available globally in multiple datacenters was gemini 2.0 era.
- aenis 2mo agoUse google pre-ga stuff at your own risk. Fine for POCs and cool demos, absolute misery in scaled prod.
- notatoad 2mo agothat matches my experience with their GA stuff though.
- Analemma_ 2mo agoI mean it was legitimately frontier for all of a week or two, and then OAI and Anthropic made better releases, and then did that several more times over the year. Google’s pace is not cutting it.
- egillie 2mo agoI remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"
- marcuschong 2mo agoWhat's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.
- DrewADesign 2mo agoMore like sects of a major religion. Or, a minor and incredibly expensive religion, in this case.
- puzzlingcaptcha 2mo agoTribalism is human nature, for better or (usually) worse.
- DrewADesign 2mo agoAs are mass hysteria dynamics.
- Andrex 2mo agohttps://youtu.be/HTpbpxNc6c0 https://youtu.be/HTpbpxNc6c0 The more things change...
- zarzavat 2mo agoAll of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
- weatherlite 2mo agoIs it failing ? Take a look at the stock price
- ActionHank 2mo ago[flagged]
- mips_avatar 2mo agoIt was inspiring watching the Gemini 3 pro team launch the model and bike away into the sunset never to launch anything again
- enos_feedler 2mo agoIts been inspiring to use it and know that I dont really need much more for all my intents and purposes.
- mountainriver 2mo agoIt was always benchmaxxed
- chaostheory 2mo agoIt’s a good substitute for search, but its effort is so low that it’s near useless for work compared to the other frontier AIs. Gemini focuses so much on response speed that everything else suffers.
- frollogaston 2mo agoPart of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.
- r0b05 2mo agoMaybe they are forced to use Google search.
- frollogaston 2mo agoNo, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
- solenoid0937 2mo agoI have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
- frollogaston 2mo agoHow much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
- solenoid0937 2mo agoMost of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously. I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework
- deleted 2mo ago
- Kalanos 2mo agoGemini has been improving by what feels like 1% every week
- xnx 2mo ago68% per year is pretty good!
- hintymad 2mo agoThis funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
- devy 2mo agoDid Gemini created this Silicon Valley TV show episode script? Makes so much sense...
- JumpCrisscross 2mo agohttps://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273 https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
- snthpy 2mo agoYes, but now we have AI to summarize tweets.
- yyaakkqq 2mo agoI wish their deep tech teams moved as fast as the privacy violating ones.
- breppp 2mo agoIf it's any solace the privacy violating ones are also slow
- bjackman 2mo agothis prompted me to search and find: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xcancel/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xcancel/
- spwa4 2mo agoThank you. Twitter has become such a terrible website in the last years. Well, since Musk, really. Real disaster.
- shadowtree 2mo agoAll this talent has delivered... Gemini. Oh well, emperors, clothes, ... you know.
- gizajob 2mo agoGemini is arguably the fulfilment of what AskJeeves promised and never delivered, nor did the rest of Silicon Valley succeed in natural language search and question answering for the 30 years it took to finally arrive. Gemini works great for answering questions and delivering answers for probably 90%+ of the things that people are going to ask Google for, while running on Google’s TPUs paid for with Google’s profits instead of hyper expensive Nvidia racks funded with VC Hopium, and integrated seamlessly free of sign ups to novel portals.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- overfeed 2mo ago> And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL As an outsider, Google seems to have a knack for minting prominence for their talent.
- nolist_policy 2mo ago> 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 The Trump admin is now regulating frontier models though.
- HlessClaudesman 2mo agoMaybe Google's decision to waste everyone's time and pollute the truth ecosystem by pushing half baked AI assertions into search was a mistake.
- ed_elliott_asc 2mo agoI quite like the ai/search thing - I like that there is a super accessible ai I can ask questions without infecting my ChatGPT history
- krige 2mo agoThe answers it gives are often trash though, even more so the whatever lobotimized model they slap on top of google search.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ShadowOfThePit 2mo agoWhy not just use temporary chats for ChatGPT?
- tim333 2mo agoI quite like it too. Convenience I guess.
- amelius 2mo agoSome of these ex-Googlers apparently are starting a new company. Any news around that? Curious what they're up to ...
- maeln 2mo agoTo be fair, I think it's pretty hard as an AI company to secure your top worker right now unless you have a significant equity compensation. Once your name is known, and you can say you are/were "top AI researcher at OpenAI/Google/Anthropic", you can probably just make you own company and raise enough money that even if the company fails, you will probably make more off of it than what you would have at your previous place of employment.
- shevy-java 2mo agoEver since Google became an adCompany, it rarely innovated anymore.
- jpadkins 2mo agoSo it hasn't innovated since Oct of 2000? (when AdWords launched)
- greenmoonx 2mo ago[dead]
- geodel 2mo agoDid all these names were huge before joining Google, and Google used their extraordinary hiring skills to get them? Or a whole bunch of them had challenging problems to solve and ample resources at their disposal to become huge? To me it is good thing in either case. Extraordinary people are leaving to make even faster research and development. A lot of talent in Google hitherto unnamed is going to get chance to shine.
- alfalfasprout 2mo agoSundar Pichai began the downfall of Google by most accounts. It went from an engineer driven culture to one of infighting, politics, and bureaucracy. It's telling when xooglers nowadays complain of maintenance and improvement of products being a career dead end vs. shipping new things. And there being so much empire building.
- narrator 2mo agoThe ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists. I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and had should have rights. At least at Grok, Elon said he wanted an AI dedicated to the truth which is an easier target to hit than what the Google gatekeepers probably wanted. The ideological purity of a Google AI must have been a real moving target though, and retraining an AI is not an cheap or fast thing.
- j2kun 2mo agoI recommend touching grass.
- anon84873628 2mo agoHard to explain the departure of Timnit Gebru if that's the case. Unless you think they actually changed corporate culture so dramatically because of that event...
- MetaverseClub 2mo ago"prominent names", lmao