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

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

#71

Post by DANmode »

mlmonkey wrote: post #46
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game. It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier. Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche. From day one everyb…

They are not "asleep at the wheel"; it's just that the people in charge (the "MBA types") have no clue what to do! There's an old saying, if you judge a fish's smarts by how well it can ride a bicycle, it will always seem dumb. The people who have risen to the top of at Google are built for a different environment than what's needed right now. They are good at playing their political games, sabotaging each other, etc…

Boeing has had smart engineers around the entire time, too.

The group running the company, is the company.

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

#72

Post by throwaw12 »

xtreak29 wrote: post #5

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…

Is Jeff also leaving Google?

I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team

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

#73

Post by jaccola »

abakker wrote: post #58
LZ_Khan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought this as well.

Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?

What is anticompetitive about it? The comment above is literally claiming they’ve been outcompeted.

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

#76

Post by krapht »

jerlam wrote: post #42
gboss wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of the innovator’s dilemma? Don’t underestimate the inertia of large companies and their unwillingness to pivot from their cash cow.

Google specifically has a track record. You could have made the same argument about social media (Google+) a decade 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.

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

#77

Post by bryanlarsen »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #26
hypnodrones wrote: post #18

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.

> Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game. It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier. Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche. From day one everyb…

- They're making a lot of money selling Tensor to Anthropic. If Nvidia's $4T market cap is justifiable, Google's position as one of the other top AI chip seller is worth a lot.

- In a world where open source Chinese models decimate Frontier models ability to charge a high price, it's the operators of efficient inference data centers that will win. Like Google

- Google is probably the biggest provider of "free" AI because it's on Google.com. That forces them to focus on cost. And in a commodity market, low-cost providers are the ones that make the money.

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

#78

Post by jorvi »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #26
hypnodrones wrote: post #18

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.

> Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game. It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier. Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche. From day one everyb…

Google doesn't need to compete. 'everyone' is locked into them via the Gapps (mostly Gmail and Maps) and Android ecosystems. Same with Apple, and Microsoft on the B2B side. It's only Anthropic, OpenAI and everyone else that _need_ to compete because switching models is painless. And they have no other revenue streams.

10 years from now, its gonna be Google, Apple and Microsoft left standing in the AI game. Well, until the US wakes up and starts attempting to break the oligopoly like the EU has recently started to do.

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

#79

Post by dgellow »

hypnodrones wrote: post #18

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.

I’m wondering if they just don’t believe that there is a good business model to be made as a frontier AI lab

Edit: hmm, no, they seem to be mentioning AGI and frontier models in https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...

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

#80

Post by jmyeet »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #30

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 wh…

We'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.
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