Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by krembo » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

Grok TL;DR cut the corporate bullshit:

- Demis gets kicked upstairs: loses day-to-day power over DeepMind, gets fancy “Chair + Chief Scientist” title so he can do TED-talk AGI destiny stuff and Isomorphic Labs instead of running the actual product machine. - Koray takes the real job: owns the models, research, Gemini, and shipping. Reports straight to Sundar. Operators over visionaries. - Jeff Dean and Sanjay peace out after 27 years to start their own nonprofit-ish thing. Google seeds it so they don’t walk to a rival with all the institutional knowledge. - Official line: “Accelerate AI + shape AGI for humanity.” Actual move: tighten operational control, keep the science-fiction narrative alive for PR/regulators, push commercial models harder. - Full-stack bragging and “950M users / singularity foothills / cure cancer” language is pure corporate theater. The org chart is the only signal that matters. - Google is in a knife fight with OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI/Meta. This is them optimizing for speed and productization while still sounding noble.

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

#202

Post by FartyMcFarter » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

stabbles wrote: post #108

bkishan wrote: post #35

By the article, it looks like he's actually stepping up.

Your comment says he's stepping up, the HN title says he's stepping down, the article says he's stepping aside. Nobody says if it's a step forward or backward.

We know he's definitely stepping. That's a start.

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

#203

Post by VCFundedGenYer » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

Can we please stop saying anything about "AGI"? I remember when people would be like "AGI in 3 months" / "AGI in 2024" / "AGI is confirmed in 2025" like stop, you don't know if it's even a thing, let alone if it's coming/imminent.

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

#204

Post by zdragnar » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

650 wrote: post #65

The first sentence is quite telling >We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products… Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought

A company is made up of people, and makes products. Products can come and go for many reasons (or any reason) but the company will always have people.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #95

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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

mlmonkey wrote: post #189

Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs. Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays. It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

luisln wrote: post #171

If all the other AI companies are promising AGI by Q4 of next year, what else can you do to satisfy shareholders than also jump on that same bandwagon?

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by WarmWash » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

tokioyoyo wrote: post #133

peterlk wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it matters that much for Google. They need to not fall hopelessly behind, but I don’t think there’s a strong economic reason for Google to burn the kind of capex that the frontier labs are burning. Strategically, I think they’re probably doing better than OpenAI and Anthropic. The Gemini models are open, and they are what researchers are working with (see neuronpedia as an example). Over time, this will…

"The company raised its full-year 2026 capex forecast to between $195 billion and $205 billion, with further significant increases planned for 2027." - Alphabet.

This is against a $500B+ backlog of demand, which is mostly from OAI and Anthropic.

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

#209

Post by redox99 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

Bjorkbat wrote: post #188

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…

Other 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.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #95

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…

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.

[deleted]