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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

#881

Post by wongarsu »

galangalalgol wrote: post #795
zarzavat wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.

If you need a less censored model that's still pretty smart and capable of some lateral thinking, it's great

Same niche as Grok, which is also great at search and less censored. Gemini is maybe a bit smarter and better on long contexts

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

#882

Post by drnick1 »

rob74 wrote: post #752
Bendy wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminded me of a bit from the GOAT political comedy Yes, Prime Minister: "But he's the Prime Minister!" "Indeed he is Bernard. He has his own car, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life. What more does he want?" "I think he wants to govern Britain." "Well stop him, Bernard!"

This is indeed what the current US administration is failing at: keeping Trump from governing the US...

TDS?

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

#884

Post by underlipton »

aurareturn wrote: post #860
underlipton wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?

keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it I don't think Google had much to do with it. It has way more to do with the internet concentrating into major communities where all the content is private. Even Reddit content is going this way. Most FB and Instagram content are private. All of Discord is unreachable by crawlers. Prior to this, just about everything on the web was open for crawlers since content want…

Google caused this by pushing people towards "brands" rather than individual pages. Those platforms only exposed the data necessary for SEO and Google refused to punish them for it.

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

#885

Post by underlipton »

usrnm wrote: post #738
underlipton wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body. It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.

Now think what ingesting a smartphone would do to your body. That's a very silly metric

I didn't say anything about ingesting.

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

#886

Post by ifwinterco »

chasd00 wrote: post #157
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game. It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier. Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche. From day one everyb…

> everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market my take on this is eventually the money is going to run out and there's going to be acquisitions and consolidation. I think that's when Google will come out on top.

Yes, good chance this all ends with Microsoft absorbing OpenAI and Google absorbing Anthropic, or something along those lines

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

#888

Post by anvuong »

weatherlite wrote: post #706
ra7 wrote: post #64

It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet. The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.

> as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet IS that a promotion or demotion ?

Alphabet is only a holding company. I wonder what kind of authority he has over scientists at Google, Waymo, Deepmind, etc. Probably close to none, so a huge demotion in everything but in title and compensation.

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

#889

Post by underlipton »

grogenaut wrote: post #622
underlipton wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body. It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.

Dynamite is ~20-60% nitro glycerine and the rest "dope" aka a stabilizer which could be sawdust for instance [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite ]. If you have heart issues, you're likely taking nitro daily for chest pain. So saying it's bad is 40% wrong at least. Makes ya think.

You don't get to unbundle the technology that was achieved by bundling and call it okay because the components are benign.

The best you can say is that dynamite was a safer alternative to preceding technology, and that its danger only comes under certain circumstances. None of that takes away from the fact that dynamite is quite dangerous when those circumstances arise, which is why it's commonly (and correctly) viewed as such.

But also, going back to the original contention - whether dynamite was neutral or positive for humanity - the destruction it and its descendants wrought in war is maybe more than counterbalanced by advancements in infrastructure. That said, if the industrialization and globalization it enabled leads to biosphere-destroying climate change, I would lean towards neutral.

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

#890

Post by cogman10 »

treis wrote: post #631
losvedir wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO, this is largely because google made their search next to worthless. They very apparently prioritized making money over returning good relevant results. The decline in quality is so pronounced that I've heard more than a few people talk about using other search engines besides google.

I don't think it's extreme to say that Bing is a better search engine than Google at this point and Bing isn't great.

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