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

Post by tiahura » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #264

xnx wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI and Anthropic have the freedom to do absolutely insane things like negligently hack other companies. It would be stock price suicide if anything even remotely happened with Google.

Google's AI was telling people to put elmer's glue on pizza to help the cheese stick [1], Gemini was turning the Founding Fathers black [2], and more. Oh and the pizza recipe was based on a joke from a reddit user named "fucksmith" - part of data that Google apparently paid some $60 million to Reddit to access. The one and only effect of this was lots of amusing posts and articles. Their stock price went up during th…

Post by vineyardmike » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

jatins wrote: post #232

vineyardmike wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is far more benign. They getting a higher ROI renting their TPUs to Anthropic et al instead of performing training and serving their own models. Google cloud has insane backlog, and has rapidly expanded to satisfy it. While those DCs get built, they’re cannibalizing their own products for it. This makes sense because (1) they are investors in Anthropic, so they still win and (2) they can always catch up on…

I don’t think so. If Kimi and Deepseek can launch models better than Gemini with much much lesser resources then it is increasingly looking like an organization issue at Google

Post by vineyardmike » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #263

jatins wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think so. If Kimi and Deepseek can launch models better than Gemini with much much lesser resources then it is increasingly looking like an organization issue at Google

No I think you misunderstood GP’s comment. The idea (which I personally don’t agree with) was that Google didn’t have to have the best models; it just needed to have the best compute infrastructure, i.e. having TPUs and the software stack to use TPUs. It was a better use of money to develop compute infrastructure than to develop better models. Perhaps Gemini itself was resource-starved because Google liked to rent ou…

Post by fooker » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:53 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.

Post by godwinson__4-8 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

tiahura wrote: post #458

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying the same thing about Google lagging behind and always end up looking rather silly. Google was going to lose search to OpenAI. Then people complained there was too much AI in Google search. Now it's pretty good and par for the course. Yes it's a huge company. So they are slower. Then they will surface it across their massive product base and keep generating cash. While having a hand in Anthropic and…

Apparently Sundar thought it was a problem.