Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.google

511–520 of 988 posts

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

#511
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what? There are some things I want AI for because it does it well. There are some things I don't want AI for because it just makes a mess (hallucinations). Maybe the next AI will be different and we will have the conversation again.

Indeed, it kills our planet, our culture and our economy extremely well. Oh yes, and some code monkeys enjoy that it can make computer code on the side.

Other sites beckon.

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

#512
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.

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

IBM is also still going, believe it or not. 260k employees, 200 billion market cap, $67 billion revenue.

I'm not sure what they do these days - it's about 20 years since I used an IBM Thinkpad to connect to an IBM pSeries.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IBM is also still going, believe it or not. 260k employees, 200 billion market cap, $67 billion revenue. I'm not sure what they do these days - it's about 20 years since I used an IBM Thinkpad to connect to an IBM pSeries.

It’s a trustworthy name for enterprises. Many executives are old enough that IBM was the Google of their time when they started their careers.

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

#514

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…

This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en

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

#515
post #362
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf, he only has to get it right once.

Being right at the wrong time is indistinguishable from being wrong.

Maybe. Was it wrong to call Madoff a fraudster in the early 2000s?

Now, I don't think this is necessarily a Madoff situation, or even a dotcom one. Ed Zitron is certainly not Markopolos. Especially evidence wise.

But, getting a date wrong doesn't necessarily mean that he's wrong in general.

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

#516

A few points: 1) the simplest explanation whenever a bunch of people leave [x] at a company at the same time, is that [x] is becoming less important to that company moving forward. It's not proof, but you know, everyone is trying really hard to say that's not what's happening here. Sometimes the simplest explanation is correct. 2) rumor is that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, got bored during pandemic lockdown and…

The breadcrumbs going back a year or so point to Deepmind wanting to be research heavy, but Google being more interested in hedging AI bets by selling compute. If you ever worked hard on something that you have a lot of conviction about, only to get denied resources for it, it's a pretty big gut punch. There is another universe where Google is hard AGI forward, freeing up as much compute as possible for Deepmind, tur…

I was really expecting Google to finesse this - not competing head-on with OpenAI and Anthropic to see who can build the largest LLM, but instead being content with an extremely capable Gemini 3.6, good enough to meet their own needs, and putting maximum effort into "more than just an LLM" AGI which would then eclipse OpenAI and Anthropic.

Instead, it seems Pichai has fumbled what they had with DeepMind, and they'll now just be a me-too LLM competitor chasing OpenAI and Anthropic from behind, in a race that will never get to AGI.

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

#517
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI. Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).

Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.

Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body.

It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.

Skeptical

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

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a rationalist community, IMHO their methodology of thought leads to much more well-reasoned takes on AI than on HN, where the discussion here is often very emotionally charged or led by wishful thinking.

When it comes to AI, LessWrong has been discussing topics for years, that HN has just started to consider, so they are much further along in the philosophical "chain of thought" so to say. LW fully understood and gamed out the risks of LLMs back when most of HN was calling them "stochastic parrots." https://ai-2027.com/

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

#520
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.

Has is been a net positive?

certainly, it has enabled the buildout of cities and infrastructure that were previously impossible to build.
Post reply on HN