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

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #104

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that's the right way to look at it, given that Google's huge head start in capital and talent did not prevent AI competition at all. It's a demonstration of reasonable, non-problematic dynamics between smaller and larger companies. (Of course, there's an implicit risk here, the folks at Cruise probably worked harder and more passionately than Waymo staff too.)

you are right. I guess what I was thinking was that google's bigness was essentially a bad capital allocation strategy, since they were lazy and not motivated by absolute return, but some combination of acceptable risk, politics, personal preferences, etc in a large management team that has seemed...disconnected for quite some time. They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability…

Post by possibilistic » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

closetheloopdev wrote: post #237

With the top AI personnel leaving Google, I wonder what will happen to their Gemini. Right now they still have a lead in inference hardware with TPUs but with both Anthropic and OpenAI developing their own chips, I wonder how long until either one will catch up.

Post by simianwords » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #269

simianwords wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I keep seeing this but this line of thinking doesn't make any sense. What does it really mean? There are expensive models that increase the probability of you doing your t…

> Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost! Because real Fable usage starts at $20/month, and has oppressive usage limits even at that (ridiculous) monthly price. Compared to my $3/month GLM-5.2 subscription, I have never felt like I was leaving capabilities on the table by refusing to cough up $20 for 15 minutes of Fable use per day.

Post by nsagent » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

Post by r0b05 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

frollogaston wrote: post #294

GodelNumbering wrote: post #199

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…

Part 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.