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- Hacker News
- Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.
There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
by gandalfgeek - Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.by oblio
- Isn’t alphabet an investor in their new endeavor?by rhipitr
- This just shows that the "great minds" of AI in these companies are not able to come up with anything that radically differentiates their AI than the others. Wether it is gemini or openAI or grok - meh they all are similar and at this point one can interchange one with the other , excep that Google sits right at the edge with almost every browser search query hitting the google search engine AKA Gemini on the backend and one can switch easily into chat mode right from the search page. I dare say that the google CEO has done his job and set up the cash printing machine but from the AI masterminds in Google, not a groundbreaking progress has been made.by la6479
- Did Jeff and Sanjay pair write their resignation letter? Wow.
- Literally, I am ... I don't know what to sayby karmasimida
- A few points:
1) the simplest explanation whenever a bunch of people leave [x] at a company at the same time, is that [x] is becoming less important to that company moving forward. It's not proof, but you know, everyone is trying really hard to say that's not what's happening here. Sometimes the simplest explanation is correct.
2) rumor is that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, got bored during pandemic lockdown and eventually returned to Google in a lower profile role, related to AI. I have to think that he still has a lot of say in what goes on in Google relative to his interests.
3) Yahoo Finance article says Hassabis "has long prioritized research over profits", so his replacement might indicate that Google has decided it is time for this stuff to pay for itself?
by rossdavidh - Google is big enough though to support deeming as a research lab and have separate gemini division.by TheqO
- The breadcrumbs going back a year or so point to Deepmind wanting to be research heavy, but Google being more interested in hedging AI bets by selling compute. If you ever worked hard on something that you have a lot of conviction about, only to get denied resources for it, it's a pretty big gut punch.
There is another universe where Google is hard AGI forward, freeing up as much compute as possible for Deepmind, turning away OAI and Anthropic, and offering the uncontested premier AI research lab, by probably an order of magnitude or more compute. Gemini 3.5 ultra is limited availability with unreal abilities.
But their balance sheet becomes terrifying, and it's all or nothing that this plays, er pays, out.
Right now though Google is pretty well hedged. Even Chinese models likely just mean more compute sold.
by WarmWash - "Dean and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider.:
Kinsley Gaffe: A mistake whereby a politician inadvertently says something truthful which they had not meant to reveal.
by adolph - the typo was the Axios article, not from Google's own announcementby xdavidliu
- I don't get what you mean?
To me the biggest news is Jeff and Sanjay leaving Google... but then not really, since Google will be "an investor". I guess that's sorta their retirement plan? And is Discovery Loop actually part of Alphabet? So complicated.
by inerte - Just some random tidbit: When I was in high school I bought every computer gaming magazine I could get my hands on and could afford with my allowance.
So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.
Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]
I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.
It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
by wernsey - 1. Never knew David Silver was there as well 2. They look like Depeche Mode in an alternate universeby ilovebigfish
- It is a bit of a tagent but still--Theme Park was dope. I was too young to grasp the compete with other businesses (stocks and shares?) level but still had a lot of fun building parks.
Instant nostalgia: https://youtu.be/tQJJ_rhHxIk?si=V8pOVwj3gYkw0xKB&t=188
by bredren - I always assumed Demis' ultimate secret motivation behind his work was the desire to deliver a version of Black and White that actually lived up to the hype
- I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this.
OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI to work at Google since their benefits will be capped by Google being large + having public company obligations.
- That was true early but OpenAI/Anthropic have done a ton of hiring over the past couple years at already-huge valuations, as much on the strength of big current base salary + equity, not just future increase speculation.by majormajor
- I think something that doesn't get talked about a lot is how bad most large tech companies are at creating new products, in general. Like, if you look at most big tech companies, they have their core offering that got them to be really large and rich, and a few other products that are somewhat successful, and then a really long tail of markets they try to enter and failed at, or projects that were modestly successful but got killed because they weren't game changers (RIP Google Reader). Most of the time when a large company does something new that succeeds, it's via an acquisition of a smaller company (ie, Google with Android or Meta with Instagram and Whatsapp)
It's funny, because I think the company that's going to be best positioned coming out of this bubble is in fact google, because they have the expertise and the capital. But I honestly can't tell you right now what their AI product even is -- I've seen so many things go into the graveyard a few months after its launched that I'm utterly confused what their offering even is at this point.
by overgard - We'll see if anyone gets to cash in on those. All you need is one down round and that gets wiped out. Or if the IPO gets delayed and disappoints then the stock can drop well before the lockouts expire. OpenAI and Anthropic are essentially offering Monopoly money in the hopes that one day you can exchange it for real money.by jmyeet
- It's not a ML talent problem. You don't need to be a genius deep learning researcher to think "Hey, maybe if we massively throttle and degrade the quality of our model while still charging the same price, that might drive people away" (as happened with Gemini 2.5 Pro, the one model where Google really was SOTA). Google's likely been providing insufficient training compute to DeepMind the same way they've been nickel-and-diming their customers, funneling it all to Search instead because that's where the money comes from.by logicchains
- > people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI
People who truly care about becoming rich*
DeepMind made enormous transformative discoveries, for instance in the world of protein folding. But that will just save human lives, not let CEOs fire their people to grab a larger piece of cake for themselves.
by mrpopo - There is no other way to describe the Gemini 3.5 pro delay than as a complete and unmitigated disaster.
It's a huge company.
It's unlikely there is any one person to blame (and entirely possible he has none of it). But things need to change.
- The answer is far more benign.
They getting a higher ROI renting their TPUs to Anthropic et al instead of performing training and serving their own models. Google cloud has insane backlog, and has rapidly expanded to satisfy it. While those DCs get built, they’re cannibalizing their own products for it.
This makes sense because (1) they are investors in Anthropic, so they still win and (2) they can always catch up on model training later when the profit opportunity shifts, or abandon it if there is no way to recapture that value.
by vineyardmike - OpenAI and Anthropic have the freedom to do absolutely insane things like negligently hack other companies. It would be stock price suicide if anything even remotely happened with Google.by xnx
- https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724
> Announcing Discovery Loop!
> I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
by xtreak29 - Turns out you can't pay em as much as VC will, hahaby stefan_
- Is Jeff also leaving Google?
I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team
by throwaw12 - Is the subtext that Demis was trying to block what Dean etc wanted to do and so they had to leave Google in order to do it?by mosura
- Is it _that_ Jeff Dean?by jgilias