Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.
There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
371–380 of 989 posts
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#372Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#373At 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?
Behind, but not clearly "far behind". Next model release from any major player could shift the leaderboard again.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#374Who knew the real revenue unlock wouldn’t be based on how much paranoid red-teaming the model underwent to resist users jailbreaking its ‘alignment’, and instead more on whether the model is post-trained to use ‘sed’ and ‘git’? Poor Gemini Scientist-heavy orgs that want to solve everything in token space may overtook tool use; meanwhile Anthropic has been super focused on MCP, Claude Code etc for over a year
What do you mean by scientist-heavy orgs solving everything in token space? I feel like they use them to make or run tools almost exclusively.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system
Are any of those advantages getting stronger over time? I guess TPUs but Google is selling several gigawatts to Anthropic
Google owns 14% of Anthropic. If Anthropic gets to superintelligence, Google wins as well. Google doesn't really need a frontier lab of its own.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Demis has been way more influential in the past decade. Jeff and Sanjay built a lot of Google's foundational software, but that was a long time ago.
Both are very smart. But Jeff was responsible for a lot more of what is actually used today than Demis. Demis is responsible for a lot more of the hype though ;) I think saying Jeff's contributions were a long time ago must represent some kind of lack of understanding of Jeff's recent contributions. Jeff has still been focused more on infrastructure, and that is just more hidden most of the time. I would say,if i was…
Agree. Demis is very smart, but obviously less humble and more interested in self-promotion. There have been multiple Deepmind documentaries that mythologize the Demis origin story.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#377So, 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.
I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#378It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet. The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
Yeah, a bit surprised that the top comments aren't discussing losing Dean, he's been a figurehead for the company for decades. It's like Apple losing Ive in a way. EDIT: "figurehead" - that's all I meant. A notable, public figure from the company who is credited with having a significant impact on its evolution. I'm not making a judgement call on his departure, or Ive's, being good or bad. That said... just give it a…
Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#379The Gemini 3.5 Pro delay has been catastrophic for Google. I'm really curious what has gone on behind the scenes there. But missing out right as AI coding agents become genuinely deeply capable and useful is just an immense failure.
They're definitely "down", but by no means "out". They're probably back in another "code red" and will need to deliver something leading edge in some area next. My bet is that Google will be the first to crack continuous knowledge cutoff updates to their model.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#380Earlier 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…
Google, of all companies, much vaunted (as in your comment!) for its huge infrastructure footprint, is renting compute from SpaceX to the tune of almost a billion a month: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920... This is in addition to bumping their CapEx spend to the extent their cash flow turned negative for the first time ever this quarter: https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-…
A deal with a company Google has a share of, announced a week before their IPO, with very non-committal terms and ramp period protections delivered in one large block on short term notice priced likely at the high end of what Google charges for A4X instances anyway.
I don’t think this reflects desperation as much as strategy.