well, at least they are not leaving to be MTS at Anthropic.
Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
561–570 of 988 posts
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#562So, 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
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually use Claude for finding stuff and recommendations. like "Find me a decent shoe with blah blah conditions" this query now goes to LLM Chat instead of google search. I use google search to find the url of something that i know exists like find the website of a company or finding address of a store.
Same I use models for nearly everything. Google only better at: - fast, even the shitty AI results are nearly instant. - some results like actors in a movie, or where to stream are useful - instead of typing a url But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.
> But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.
Funnily enough, their core revenue driver (Google Ads) is very broken too. I'm trying to run some ads, but for a week they haven't been showing due to some invisible combination of flags when the campaign was created. There's no way of knowing they're not showing from the dashboard, it only becomes apparent when you try and preview the ads with one of your search terms.
I know everyone is long Google but that experience seriously makes me question how valuable their ad business will stay in the future.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#564> I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.
Here is someone spelling out explicitly what we should be discussing. More power to you, Demis Hassabis. Thank you!
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is Claude is losing money serving you that, and while Google makes money serving you the same result. On top of that, you are paying Claude to get that same result. Unless Claude adds ads, it isnt going to be sustainable for both Anthropic or you - and congrats, you've invented Google Search.
Google and ChatGPT are both running LLMs on free user queries. If Google is doing it more profitably, it’s because they have a much more mature ad business, and/or they are running a cheaper LLM. There’s no fundamental difference in the business model in that specific product line. Regarding Claude, it’s true they must be losing money on free users since they promised they won’t put ads there. Speculatively, I think…
Eventually they will show ads. Ads are like disease, we can stop for sometime, but they will find a way to infect. Eg. Netflix, chatgpt etc..
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#566Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era. There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
This just shows that the "great minds" of AI in these companies are not able to come up with anything that radically differentiates their AI than the others. Wether it is gemini or openAI or grok - meh they all are similar and at this point one can interchange one with the other , excep that Google sits right at the edge with almost every browser search query hitting the google search engine AKA Gemini on the backend…
AlphaFold is interesting. Maybe LLMs converge because the ideal "use of language" converges. But there are other types of model.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#567Earlier 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.
Yes
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#568Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era. There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
This just shows that the "great minds" of AI in these companies are not able to come up with anything that radically differentiates their AI than the others. Wether it is gemini or openAI or grok - meh they all are similar and at this point one can interchange one with the other , excep that Google sits right at the edge with almost every browser search query hitting the google search engine AKA Gemini on the backend…
I don’t know man I prefer Gemini to everything other than claude I’m really surprised at the late comeback and happy for it
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#569Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era. There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.
Who knows what will happen in 20 years. Right now, it's not the case.
Re: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
#570Earlier 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...
Can you explain this behavior a little bit more. Where do they seek information - is it a consumer chat app, social media app’s search functions?