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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

#921

Post by atdt »

paxys wrote: post #144

DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.

We don't know exactly what Google's leadership was thinking, nor how the AI race will shape up in the coming months and years. Calling it a "failure" seems presumptuous and premature. But supposing your read is correct: what made this outcome predictable, in your view?

How do you avoid being the Xerox to the Microsofts and Apples of AI?

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

#923

Post by ragall »

ethbr1 wrote: post #763
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #583

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 That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.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. 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.

The problem at Google is their (lacking) process for Preview -> GA. Maybe it's a consequence of their rigorousness around SRE, but it doesn't seem like there's a plausible and efficient path for that to happen. Ergo, the only competitive options from Google are ever-Preview products.

The process was, as we were informally told during orientation, that "Preview" means some SVP thinks this has a chance of going over the minimum threshold of 200M worldwide users and is willing to put his weight behind that product, and "GA" means the product has gone over that threshold and will be "supported" until it goes back below the threshold at which point competing SVPs will start sharpening their knives, preparing to stick them in the back of the SVP that is currently in charge of the product.

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

#924

Post by ragall »

arthurjj wrote: post #898
Cidan wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close. Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc. But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

> I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated.

In 2015, the SRE org started project "Prod 2020", with the goal of unifying the SRE stacks and modernizing the web tools. It was quite successful.

If by "web tooling" you mean the tools for producing public-facing HTML services, those were used by a surprisingly small percentage of developers.

> But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.

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

#925

Post by mikert89 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #906
mikert89 wrote: post #900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fate of the company partially rests on whether deep mind does well, you sound like an MBA

>the fate of the company partially rests on whether deep mind does well I'm honestly not sure about that. They need a decent LLM to fight off the threat of LLMs replacing search, but I'd say that Gemini 3.6 Flash is more than good enough for that, with a smaller/cheaper model being preferred to a larger one. If you are "searching" for a proof to the Jacobian conjecture, then try Fable, and I doubt Google will miss th…

what are you even trying to argue? that the most critical part of the biggest companies on the planet dont need to pay above market?

i know people at deep mind, its impacting their ability to deliver good products

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

#926

Post by ragall »

frollogaston wrote: post #914
arthurjj wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc. But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

I still don't understand why all that dynamic config stuff isn't just Python. Sure, static configs should be protos, but GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. Have heard some language purity rants involving determinism, but I don't buy it. And they keep inventing new stuff like Starlark. They need to stop.

> GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python.

The GCL designers made several mistakes in its design, but the worse was the lack of a versioning that would make language evolution easier, as well as interoperability between different versions. GCL2 solved some issues, mainly cleaning up the interpreter. Still, BCL is IMNSHO by far the best infra language there is.

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

#927

Post by ragall »

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…

Angular is not a developer tool, it's a UI framework. Closure might qualify, but it was not a general tool used by the entire company. The developer tools we're talking here are Critique, Blaze, Forge, Sigma, etc...

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

#928

Post by ragall »

frollogaston wrote: post #500
summerlight wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circu…

I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.

You have no clue what you're talking about.

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

#929

Post by janalsncm »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #880
janalsncm wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your own math, doing this would have required SpaceX stock to go up $200B just to break even, and then Google would have to liquidate it.

What do you mean? Google bought SpaceX shares when it was a tiny startup. They are probably more than 100X on their initial investment. Even with a 99% drop in SpaceX stock, Google would still be positive. Edit. Google invested 900 million in 2015 for roughly 5% of the company which comes out to 71.5 Billion dollars at 1.45 Trillion dollar current valuation. That's an 80x increase. I think Larry Page individually mig…

It doesn’t matter what price they bought SpaceX stock for. They could have gotten it for free. Any gain prior to Google’s investment could be realized prior to Google giving SpaceX even more money. What matters is the return on investment for the $12B/year into SpaceX.

In order get that back by “pumping” SpaceX stock, SpaceX market cap would have had to increase $200B based on that investment, and then Google would need to sell the stock.

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

#930

Post by SR2Z »

sysguest wrote: post #823
galangalalgol wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not have chosen the word governing for that sentence but I'm not sure what fits best. Plundering, pillaging, gutting, ransacking, Rick rolling, despoilng, or perhaps molesting.

...molesting? a country? ...how?

Sending ICE agents to chase around random children and demand they (on their own) provide proof of citizenship sure seems to fit the bill to me.
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