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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

#181

Post by WarmWash »

vineyardmike wrote: post #122
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…

The 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…

Awfully 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.

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

#183

Post by JacobAsmuth »

colesantiago wrote: post #21
tosh wrote: post #7

can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?

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 ha…

> mobile era CEO

He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.

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

#185

Post by frabcus »

VulgarExigency wrote: post #123
xnx wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI 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.

There'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"

Hmm. 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.

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

#186

Post by majormajor »

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…

That 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.

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

#187

Post by chasd00 »

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.

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

#188

Post by Bjorkbat »

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…

One 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/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.

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