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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

#531

Post by chermi »

watwut wrote: post #150
krapht wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Gemini really doomed? I'm still bullish on Google: 1) they have more free cash flow and capital than God due to the ads business 2) they have data - intent from web searches, youtube videos, google books and music 3) they have dedicated inference hardware for all these reasons, is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? some day the pace of improvement will slow, and googl…

> is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? Yeah, this is one of the things I find so weird on the discourse. If you get there negligeably later, but without astonishing spend and waste, you might even be better off in the long term.

It depends entirely on whether they're trying to and failing vs. being strategic. It smells a lot more like the former to me.

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

#532

Post by browningstreet »

rockskon wrote: post #526
swat535 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years. They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,.. You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals. I don't think Google is going anywhere.

Once upon a time it would've been unthinkable for Google search to become awful and nearly worthless due, in large part, by Google's discretionary choices. Related - interns these days don't seem to have any particular preference for using Google for finding information...

^FTFY “interns these days don’t seem to have any particular preference for finding information”

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

#533

Post by chermi »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #30

I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this. OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people wh…

This makes a lot of sense to me. Probably doesn't explain everything but I could see it explaining a lot. Could also explain openai and anthropic delaying IPO (among other factors)

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

#534

Post by reaperducer »

nightshift1 wrote: post #522
reaperducer wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going. So is IBM. There was a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back about how IBM is flying under the radar, and doing well by not taking the hype bait. It noted that 70% of all credit card transactions on the planet go through an IBM system.

It ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers.

It ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers.

The problem is that those COBOL systems have to be absolutely provably correct, for both financial and regulatory reasons. LLMs can't do that. They're designed to be variable.

You can't vibe code a bank transaction system. "Close enough" isn't good enough in some fields. A minor glitch in a video game may result in screen artifacts. A minor glitch in a banking system can crash the economy.

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

#535

Post by smcleod »

swat535 wrote: post #502
oblio wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years. They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,.. You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals. I don't think Google is going anywhere.

I think it's a bit inflated to label Gmail a "great tech for consumers". Maps certainly, YouTube mostly, Chrome & Android for loyalists, but Gmail hasn't been "great tech" for well over a decade.

Additionally these are all old products - even the company's more recent products such as Gemini feel stale and on unsteady ground.

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

#536

Post by chermi »

vineyardmike wrote: post #122
atleastoptimal wrote: post #30

I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this. OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people wh…

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 Google is that freaking short-sighted. Even if you're not trying to be frontier, the value of having domain knowledge via experience for AI is worth saving internal compute alone. By all accounts Google believes in ai as much as everyone else.

If AI turns out 1/100 as important as they seem to think, it would be insane to intentionally be slack on it.

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

#537

Post by mikert89 »

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.

google had the best tooling a decade ago...

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

#538

Post by chermi »

hyperadvanced wrote: post #250
EthanHeilman wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Google is one of the few parties that can monetize AI because Google has a massive moat in the form of their products: gmail, chrome, photos, search, etc... and Google already has the custom-built chips and datacenters. Google spending money on competing head to head with your LLMs is a waste of money for Google. If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both. All the in…

In retrospect this is very similar to the Apple strategy: don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency, position for novel uses of the tech but don’t build it per se. Apple probably would have benefitted in the last 4 quarters from hyping a custom model stack but it doesn’t seem that this strategy paid off to even close to 20% ROI while Apple got to hold their cash and organizational f…

But paying so little attention to it that it no longer is a core competency? As in, the people most representative of that competency leaving in droves? I doubt that was the plan.

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

#539

Post by CountHackulus »

thefourthchime wrote: post #525
swat535 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years. They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,.. You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals. I don't think Google is going anywhere.

The newest of those are 20 years old. Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.

Gmail is going to be Google's System/390 mainframes.

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

#540

Post by CoolestBeans »

fluidcruft wrote: post #121
krapht wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Gemini really doomed? I'm still bullish on Google: 1) they have more free cash flow and capital than God due to the ads business 2) they have data - intent from web searches, youtube videos, google books and music 3) they have dedicated inference hardware for all these reasons, is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? some day the pace of improvement will slow, and googl…

I don't know if they are doomed but https://isaiprofitable.com/ seems concerning about Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.

So long as search revenue isn't correlated to AI revenue or threatened by AI revenue, Google at any point can bail on AI spending and suddenly the free cash flow machine is back on. Yeah they have a far larger debt load they now have to service but cash flow from search revenue is so strong it wouldn't be much of a blip.
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