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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

#431

Post by vkou »

WarmWash wrote: post #307
CamperBob2 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which would be disastrous to the conglomorate as a whole. It's good for Google that they can't.

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

#432

Post by vkou »

oblio wrote: post #406
pixl97 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No, no, no" a person on Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube screams for the billionth time. "It's all marketing" as the terminator bots kick in the door and slaughter their families.

Cute story. How could they stop this timeline, even if they were true believers?

They can't, we are all living in a suicide pact of 'Let these guys do whatever they want, consequences be damned.'

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

#434

Post by frollogaston »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #420
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.

> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling. this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.

Only the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper.

Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.

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

#435

Post by Analemma_ »

squidbeak wrote: post #284
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…

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

I mean it was legitimately frontier for all of a week or two, and then OAI and Anthropic made better releases, and then did that several more times over the year. Google’s pace is not cutting it.

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

#436

Post by baron816 »

jrflo wrote: post #412
impulser_ wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.

Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches.

Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.

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

#437

Post by vkou »

frollogaston wrote: post #430
vkou wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tooling is not the problem. If shit takes forever to launch, it's because there are many stakeholders that need to be satisfied (some for security, some for regulatory, some for the kinds of politics you get in a company that employs almost half a million people.)

But GDM isn't gated on launches. They were freely releasing things internally for dogfood. Problem is that stuff was just not as good as the competition.

A particular Google product being shit is a data point, but is orthogonal to my opinion about why it is slow to launch products/features.

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

#438

Post by croemer »

thorncorona wrote: post #315
firasd wrote: post #312

Who 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

Gemini isn't as heavily aligned as OAI / Ant models ..?

Yes, Gemini let's me do SARS-CoV-2 evolution research (perfectly safe, should never be blocked but is impossible with OAI/Ant)

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

#439

Post by LarsDu88 »

keeda wrote: post #195
peterlk wrote: post #114

Earlier 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-…

This move was purely to pump up SpaceX stock price at its current absurd valuation b/c Google owns something like 6% of SpaceX

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

#440

Post by quietbritishjim »

baron816 wrote: post #436
jrflo wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly…

People 100% are asking ChatGPT for all those things.
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