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

Post by frollogaston » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 4:20 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #640

frollogaston wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by sheeshkebab » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 4:28 AM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #377

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.

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.

Post by sidcool » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 4:45 AM UTC

atonse wrote: post #107

sidcool wrote: post #89

Sundar Pichai: @DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs. https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093 So it's not stepping down, right?

If it's anything like what happened with others (like Eric Schmidt), Chairman is basically "you're out from day to day stuff but we'll give you a pot of money to say you're still senior and still here, to save face and the stock price, while you give a bunch of talks for the next few months" So yes fancy title, but basically, someone who can move the stock price is quitting and we're trying to ease the perception of…

Post by antupis » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 4:52 AM UTC

IncreasePosts wrote: post #637

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #450

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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

Post by ackbar03 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 4:56 AM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #450

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

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.