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

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611–620 of 988 posts

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

#611

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…

[deleted]

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

#612

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…

All this talent has delivered... Gemini. Oh well, emperors, clothes, ... you know.

Gemini is arguably the fulfilment of what AskJeeves promised and never delivered, nor did the rest of Silicon Valley succeed in natural language search and question answering for the 30 years it took to finally arrive. Gemini works great for answering questions and delivering answers for probably 90%+ of the things that people are going to ask Google for, while running on Google’s TPUs paid for with Google’s profits instead of hyper expensive Nvidia racks funded with VC Hopium, and integrated seamlessly free of sign ups to novel portals.

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

#613

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.

Not so much hardware these days, about half of IBM's revenue comes from software (Red Hat related stuff alone probably brings in a ton), and about 20% comes from consulting

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

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about going strong. $1,000 in Microsoft stock in 1990 would have made you a multi-millionaire today. $1,000 in IBM stock in 1990 would make you a ten-thousandaire today.

apples to oranges comparison. 1990 is early days for MS. 1990 is gorilla days for IBM.

For reference, IBM was founded in 1911. At the time "computer" was a profession, not a machine, and the majority of US households had no electricity or telephone service

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

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?

I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it. Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their…

Agreed:)

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

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Well at least HN hasn't (yet?) spawned a murderous death cult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians

Anarchism, eh? If anything, HN cult would be pro-Arch.

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

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.

I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"

All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.

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

#620

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

lmao that's actually so good
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