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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

#281

No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar. If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?

Public warning: please don't trade on Ed's idiotic analyses. Or if you do, look at his track record so far, and apply the Kelley Criterion to your bet sizing.

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

#282
post #95

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.

If Google put out a blog post about Gemini 4 having escaped its sandbox via 0-day exploit to then hack other companies, I unironically believe this would result in a boost to their stock price.

They could really use some encouraging news about the competitiveness of their AI lab.

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

#283
At least judging from the headlines, it seems Google is far behind on AI. Fable/GPT 5.6 and recently Kimi get a lot of attention, solve long-standing math problems and lead in coding. It seems that Google's supposed advantages of very deep pockets, original talent, vast amounts of data and unmatched distribution are really not making that much of a difference. What is going wrong?

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

#284

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 relea…

Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.

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

#285
post #154
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…

I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to…

> Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available

I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flash is in high demand I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?

Does everyone want AI?

I guess it should be said, of everyone who wants AI, they don't want to pay the expense for it to the level they want to use it.

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

#287
Just some random tidbit: When I was in high school I bought every computer gaming magazine I could get my hands on and could afford with my allowance.

So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.

Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]

I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.

It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

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

#288

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…

I 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.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Google is one of the few parties that can monetize AI because Google has a massive moat in the form of their products: gmail, chrome, photos, search, etc... and Google already has the custom-built chips and datacenters. Google spending money on competing head to head with your LLMs is a waste of money for Google. If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both. All the in…

And Gemini seems about as good as a search engine as any of the other LLMs, if you use them casually. And Google has the brand-name recognition. Right now AI companies are competing to make LLMs better at graduate-school level tasks. They all can already competently tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or when the first Led Zeppelin album was released.

Gemini seems like a better search engine than the alternatives because it has access to Google's massive crawler feeds. I think Google could charge 30 dollars month for Gemini + all the data Google has locked up (Scholar, Books, crawled webpages, Google Groups, Usenet archives + search of your personalized datasets such as calendars, photos, emails, docs, slides, etc...). I'd pay that easily.

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

#290

No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar. If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?

Superstar? This Ed Zitron? "Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI." -July 29, 2024 https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548

As it stands, the leaked financials prove him correct. Given their losses (not counting restructuring) they are going to need enough funding to buy any of the bottom 300-400 of the F500 companies outright just to keep the lights on for the next year.

To say that’s an outrageous amount isn’t overstating in the slightest.

Given they are already being forced to drop inference prices in an attempt to compete with Chinese providers, I don’t know if billionaire investors will be willing to hand out that much money this time around if they can’t generate enough value to break even despite the hype.

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