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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

#631

Post by treis »

losvedir wrote: post #462
Analemma_ wrote: post #225

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…

I hardly use Google search anymore in favor of ChatGPT. It's surely an existential threat. Google has a lot of layers of defense in Android, Chrome, Gmail/Accounts, and a stranglehold on internet ads. But at the center of that is search and search is being replaced by LLMs.

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

#632

Post by clhodapp »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #583
clhodapp wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated. That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.

> That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated. > That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B. My experience differs: (conservative) companies like stability, so calling some very new model "Preview" is a good idea to make it clear to the customer that this frontier model should be treated as more experimental than the default offering.

That's fine, but it should still have the same technical availability level

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

#634

Post by nunez »

hintymad wrote: post #514
GodelNumbering wrote: post #199

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

Nice post, but this reads as the Google of yesterday and the OpenAI of some near-distant future.

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

#635

Post by throw-the-towel »

hintymad wrote: post #514
GodelNumbering wrote: post #199

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

This is so good, it gave me flashbacks.

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

#636

Post by flymasterv »

frollogaston wrote: post #294
GodelNumbering wrote: post #199

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…

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.

Thank you!

Google’s tooling was, hands down, the worst I have ever encountered. I did 10 years at GOOG, 3 at AMZN, 4 in research, and another 5 at companies you have heard of but wouldn’t be impressed by, and every day GOOG infuriated me.

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

#637

Post by IncreasePosts »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #450
taurath wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Probably not going to happen, but I'd love to see Isomorphic Labs separate from Alphabet with Hassabis still as CEO. He's too pure minded to be at company like Google.

He won a nobel prize for his work on protein folding while at Google...it seems like they give him a lot of room to explore problems that aren't directly related to serving ads

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

#638

Post by flymasterv »

frollogaston wrote: post #474
fooker wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.

React? Lucky. I wrote Closure (with an S) at GOOG in anger 5 years ago, and only stopped because I switched teams.

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

#639

Post by fragmede »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #585
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: can I ask why? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :) I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.

For me it’s the massive amount of resources it takes to produce and run one. As the story goes, skynet infects everyone’s computer and runs itself locally on it. Whereas it’s looking like it’s not even possible for an AGI to escape from one lab to another, let alone cause real world damage. AGI’s definition is different for everyone. Some already believe it’s here. I’m partly in that camp. LLMs are intelligent and ge…

Have you seen https://poc.bcachefs.org/ or https://harmonique.one/posts/i-gave-claude-access-to-my-pen-... ?

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

#640

Post by nostrademons »

frollogaston wrote: post #474
fooker wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.

Angular was an acquisition and isn't all that commonly used within Google.

Closure was the homegrown framework that's everywhere. It is a different flavor of bad than Angular. Angular was basically "You too can make your Javascript look like HTML", Closure is "You too can make your Javascript look like Java", and nobody bothered to ask Why? For that matter, React was "You too can make your Javascript look like Ocaml." JQuery was the only framework that really let Javascript be Javascript (other than writing in vanilla JS, which post-ES2015 wasn't as insane as it sounds).

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