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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

#301

Post by champagnepapi »

glitchcrab wrote: post #251
kokanee wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does everyone want AI?

Single data point; no, I don't. I preferred the pre-AI world. It makes me sad that we'll never see it again.

Personally, In SWE, i think the industry has made a grave mistake with the agents and we're just one big Catastrophe waiting to happen. I do think that there is very real value when software engineers use these tools as something akin to exoskeletons that allow the human to do more, rather than just fully replacing them. However, I'm finding more and more that companies are slop shops and just attempting to automate all of their software engineering. That will certainly end terribly. I hope we are not cannon fodder.

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

#302

Post by frollogaston »

r0b05 wrote: post #299
frollogaston wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they are forced to use Google search.

No, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.

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

#303

Post by hajile »

echelon wrote: post #276
root-parent wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they did raise new funding as he predicted...Since July 2024, OpenAI has raised or secured roughly $170 billion in new capital. Numbers never see before. So yes its the one, and remarkably right so far.

You can't imagine OpenAI being a multi-trillion dollar company? Open weights will drop costs, but distribution matters. OpenAI has that. Costs will come down. Deep entrenchment will not.

How will costs come down?

Each generation of model is more expensive to train and run than the last.

More efficient hardware? That means throwing out billions of dollars worth of existing hardware and buying billions more in hardware. The cheapest hardware is the stuff they already have because spending $70B in hardware to halve a $2-4B electricity bill just doesn’t make financial sense (and that’s if doubling hardware efficiency can happen before they go under).

If they cut costs by using smaller models, they are then racing to the bottom vs China which seems hard to do (especially with China’s cheap solar energy).

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

#304

Post by reducesuffering »

root-parent wrote: post #268
reducesuffering wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And they did raise new funding as he predicted...Since July 2024, OpenAI has raised or secured roughly $170 billion in new capital. Numbers never see before. So yes its the one, and remarkably right so far.

Notice how he didn't say "I predict they will raise new funding", he predicted collapse, with the implicit retort that there's no way they will raise more funding than has ever been done before and invent a whole new AI. He was mocking the supposed things that would need to happen. He strongly assumed collapse.

2 years these charlatans have had their "imminent collapse" predictions repeatedly wrong, meanwhile all valuations, AGI progress in unsolved problems, and frontier leadership have been repeatedly vindicated that we are beginning ASI / the singularity.

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

#305

Post by willy_k »

Oras wrote: post #285
jcfrei wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s because a significant portion of the work and spending going on at frontier labs is generating new, more curated data, in select domains like software engineering and now biology[1].

[1] https://www.synbiobeta.com/read/anthropic-is-hiring-biologis...

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

#306

Post by bigyabai »

simianwords wrote: post #295
bigyabai wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is the wrong way to look at it. If you have a complicated task , you can solve it for cheaper if you used Fable. It will use fewer turns to achieve the same result. You can solve it for cheaper if you use GLM but if you are involved in it more, but that defeats the purpose.

It's not cheaper if the price of admission is $20 for the first taste. And it's definitely not cheaper to pay per-token versus using my GLM-5.2 quota.

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

#307

Post by WarmWash »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #246
Analemma_ wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?

Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler. Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sol…

Google's weakness (well one of) is its total lack of cohesion. If the Google Books team could, they would sell access to that data in a heartbeat to boost their metrics.

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

#308

Post by andsoitis »

keeda wrote: post #229
andsoitis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the new cow doesn’t have cash, it is better to stick to the cow you know.

Unfortunately the new cow is cannibalizing the old cow, so Google is in a bit of a bind here. (So far I cannot imagine them monetizing AI overviews enough to compensate for the sharp loss of ads on SERPs.) To its credit Google seems willing to disrupt itself before its competitors can.

One option would be to become vegetarian.

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

#309

Post by jdross »

stevemk14ebr wrote: post #267
colesantiago wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're crazy of you think Demis is CEO of alphabet material. He's an accomplished AI researcher, Google does about 10000 other things than AI.

Demis is CEO of Alphabet material. He would be exceptional in that role, and Google would be wise to put him there

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

#310

Post by tibbar »

returnInfinity wrote: post #252
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.

As what? CEO? Demis will not take up the MTS role.

The labs are all very interested in bio right now. Demis is working on Isomorphic rn (Google's version of that) but I could imagine a lab tempting him away to work on their equivalent if it had stronger momentum
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