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

Post by oblio » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #377

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.

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.

Post by minraws » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

Post by re-thc » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #244

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?

Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system

Post by tim333 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #225

xnx wrote: post #9

> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down…

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?

Post by htrp » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:04 PM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #289

asdfman123 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.