Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by firasd » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

biophysboy wrote: post #374

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

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.

I'm saying AI researchers have a bias towards thinking what needs to happen is prompt -> [crunching tokens] -> response rather than prompt -> [orchestrates 5 tools] -> response

In other words 'just add a calculator tool' is not as sexy research-wise as making the model accurately eyeball arithmetic in its chain of thought. Maybe I'm wrong but that seems to be the case

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

#472

Post by suncemoje » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:17 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #447

quietbritishjim wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People 100% are asking ChatGPT for all those things.

Someone deleted a reply to this comment “And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?” they wrote and I think the question is important: LLM chatbots can crawl the web just as well as Google.

Huh? But only if you give it a tool it can use - which brings you back to Google (or Bing)

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

#473

Post by suncemoje » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

ai-x wrote: post #446

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.

Search is now only 50% of the revenue. But sure keep the myth going.

Cloud business is making big dollar I suppose

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

#474

Post by frollogaston » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #457

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.

Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so. Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.

Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.

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

#475

Post by frollogaston » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #397

frollogaston wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.

Most of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously. I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework

Looked up LessWrong. Eh, philosophy people, also known for that "Roko's basilisk" meme. I'm gonna pass.

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

#476

Post by kridsdale1 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #424

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems there's a big shake up on the underperforming Gemini side. Before there was Shazeer (already gone) and Vinyals as co-leads, reporting to Hassabis, now Gemini comes under Kavukcuoglu reporting direct to Pichai as SVP of DeepMind. Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside. He had been CEO of DeepMind, but that position no longer exists and it seems Kavukcuoglu is now leading DeepMind with a title of SVP. Hassab…

> Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside. Yeah he seemed too reasonable to me, relative to the fervor. Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing to catch up to the ferver that would justify their valuations and investments

Same thing happened to Yan LeCun.

Real scientists are skeptical. Wall St and the people who serve it don’t like that.

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

#477

Post by rryan » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

frollogaston wrote: post #434

VirusNewbie wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 direct…

No longer the case

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

#478

Post by frollogaston » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #452

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.

If the tools are all in the same monorepo idk if that's actually true

What do you mean about them being in the monorepo?

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

#479

Post by Eueudhsbsj32 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

> It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.

It think the vast majority is what the decision to leave says about the overall sentiment at Google, not the value of these two individuals.

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

#480

Post by root_axis » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

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.

> which is now on much shakier footing

Is it though? As far as I can tell they continue to maintain total domination of web search, and LLMs do not replace search engines, they work on top of them.