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

Post by greenavocado » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 12:03 AM UTC

baron816 wrote: post #436

jrflo wrote: post #412

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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.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly…

Post by aidis9136264 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 12:07 AM UTC

Bjorkbat wrote: post #188

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…

One theory I've been entertaining is that whenever GPT-3.5 came out a lot of people were talking about the "bitter lesson" and how scale was all we really needed to get to AGI. No need for any fancy tricks, just release a larger model trained on more data, by the time we released a hypothetical "GPT-5 sized" model we'd have AGI. Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been…

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 12:15 AM UTC

greenavocado wrote: post #572

toomuchtodo wrote: post #447

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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.

The answer is Exa

Post by greenavocado » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 12:16 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #575

greenavocado wrote: post #572

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The answer is Exa

Nah, just another startup that’ll get acquired or a similar fate. Building the capability is a superior option imho, if you’re at Anthropic or OpenAI scale. Cut out the middleman.

Post by dnnehgf » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 12:21 AM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #492

taurath wrote: post #424

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> 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

Google's capex is to capture the compute purchases from the other labs. The amount they are spending on Gemini is probably shockingly low...and hence researchers leaving for better watered pastures.