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.
xnx 2 hours ago [-]
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.
VulgarExigency 2 hours ago [-]
There's no doubt in my mind that they set up the conditions for their models to escape the sandboxes. "haha oops our incredibly powerful models escaped we need 1 trillion more dollars and really this is yet another reason why no one else should be allowed to build this technology"
IsTom 1 hours ago [-]
It might also be that the security sandbox was haphazardly vibeslopped together.
frabcus 1 hours ago [-]
Hmm. And the AISI unintended model hacking yesterday was also just marketing for the British Government?
At some point we have to all accept that powerful AI is most likely dangerous AI as well, almost by definition.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
"No, no, no" a person on Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube screams for the billionth time. "It's all marketing" as the terminator bots kick in the door and slaughter their families.
somenameforme 37 minutes ago [-]
Google's AI was telling people to put elmer's glue on pizza to help the cheese stick [1], Gemini was turning the Founding Fathers black [2], and more. Oh and the pizza recipe was based on a joke from a reddit user named "fucksmith" - part of data that Google apparently paid some $60 million to Reddit to access. The one and only effect of this was lots of amusing posts and articles. Their stock price went up during the whole ordeal.
If Google put out a blog post about Gemini 4 having escaped its sandbox via 0-day exploit to then hack other companies, I unironically believe this would result in a boost to their stock price.
They could really use some encouraging news about the competitiveness of their AI lab.
xnx 2 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if we'll ever know the story of Gemini 3.5 Pro. Is it possible Google saw its potential for hacking, tried to nerf it, and ended up ruining the training run?
1 hours ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
vineyardmike 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jatins 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think so. If Kimi and Deepseek can launch models better than Gemini with much much lesser resources then it is increasingly looking like an organization issue at Google
kccqzy 37 minutes ago [-]
No I think you misunderstood GP’s comment. The idea was that Google didn’t have to have best models; it just needed to have the best compute infrastructure (TPUs). It was a better use of money to develop compute infrastructure than to develop better models. Perhaps Gemini itself was resource starved because Google liked to rent out TPUs to Anthropic instead. (Second-hand information: I heard that Mythos/Fable were trained on Google TPUs.)
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
Awfully ironic that Google makes more money (probably an order or magnitude or so) from it's direct competitors than it does from a it's own product.
mrpopo 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
onlyrealcuzzo 2 hours ago [-]
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.
EthanHeilman 2 hours ago [-]
I disagree. Google is one of the few parties that can monetize AI because Google has a massive moat in the form of their products: gmail, chrome, photos, search, etc... and Google already has the custom-built chips and datacenters.
Google spending money on competing head to head with your LLMs is a waste of money for Google. If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both. All the investors throwing money into OpenAI, Anthropic, are just accidentally subsidizing Google's product development. Google shouldn't spend its AI research capital in an arms race with Anthropic but instead should invest in AI approaches that no one else is investigating at scale. That way Google can hedge against LLMs hitting a wall.
There is a real but small danger to Google that Anthropic replaces Google as a search engine, but that is an uphill fight for Anthropic. Google has massive brand recognition, network effects with gmail and chrome, Anthropic can't just copy what works from Google. On the other hand Google can copy what works for Anthropic. Google would have to play poorly to lose that fight.
Probably the worse case for Google is that software becomes so cheap and easy to create and maintain that all of Google's product offerings become commoditized. Even in that world Google has a lock on infrastructure. Perhaps ASI software creation completely removes that as well? If so we are living in a post-singularity world and probably the stockmarket doesn't exist anymore either.
hyperadvanced 50 minutes ago [-]
In retrospect this is very similar to the Apple strategy: don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency, position for novel uses of the tech but don’t build it per se. Apple probably would have benefitted in the last 4 quarters from hyping a custom model stack but it doesn’t seem that this strategy paid off to even close to 20% ROI while Apple got to hold their cash and organizational focus on their main thing
asdfman123 1 hours ago [-]
And Gemini seems about as good as a search engine as any of the other LLMs, if you use them casually. And Google has the brand-name recognition.
Right now AI companies are competing to make LLMs better at graduate-school level tasks. They all can already competently tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or when the first Led Zeppelin album was released.
EthanHeilman 24 minutes ago [-]
Gemini seems like a better search engine than the alternatives because it has access to Google's massive crawler feeds. I think Google could charge 30 dollars month for Gemini + all the data Google has locked up (Scholar, Books, crawled webpages, Google Groups, Usenet archives + search of your personalized datasets such as calendars, photos, emails, docs, slides, etc...). I'd pay that easily.
jatins 60 minutes ago [-]
> If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both
Google buys Anthropic for cheap? How?
EthanHeilman 32 minutes ago [-]
Anthropic has no moat, their models just get distilled and resold. They can maybe get good margins when LLM improvement rate is very high but as it slows down they are looking at commodity margins. Google has the products that makes that commodity more than just cost of electricity + 0.5%.
My case is based on the assumption that Anthropic will not hit RSI or if it does RSI rapidly hits a wall. Faster your growth curve, the faster you eat all the low hanging fruit and s-curve. I could be wrong here, maybe RSI will cause a hard takeoff singularity by 2030 and just keep going, but if that happens the world fundamentally changes.
overfeed 2 hours ago [-]
> But things need to change.
Not all change is good, as proven by Zuckerberg's response after the lackluster Llama 4 release. The radical restructuring appears to have made things worse.
ignoramous 2 hours ago [-]
How? Muse Spark 1.1 is a huge step up from Llama 4 & competitive with xAI's Grok 4.5. In another 3 to 4 releases, MSL might very well be challenging Ant & OAI. Moonshot, despite their comparatively limited resources, has already demonstrated that the Big 2 aren't invincible.
sigmoid10 2 hours ago [-]
Google was always at the frontier of real research, but has been abysmal at shipping good products (at least since Sundar). The core company is run for margins and interest rates by the business people nowadays.
mynameisjonny_ 2 hours ago [-]
Gemini 3.1-pro was genuinely SOTA for a few weeks, in fairness
31 minutes ago [-]
godwinson__4-8 2 hours ago [-]
People keep saying the same thing about Google lagging behind and always end up looking rather silly. Google was going to lose search to OpenAI. Then people complained there was too much AI in Google search. Now it's pretty good and par for the course.
Yes it's a huge company.
So they are slower. Then they will surface it across their massive product base and keep generating cash. While having a hand in Anthropic and others via investment anyway.
Google doesn't need to offer you the bleeding edge at startup pace. They're playing a different game. When the bubble pops they will be well positioned really no matter the outcome to continue to capitalize as their competitors implode or get absorbed.
The idea a delay is a "complete and unmitigated disaster" is just laughable. People have been saying this about Google since ChatGPT first invaded the public consciousness. Google will continue to do well, the histrionics of people like you aside.
asdfman123 1 hours ago [-]
That's one thing everyone needs to remember. AI is here to stay, but the bubble IS going to pop. This level of spending is unsustainable. Soon the market will readjust and the amount of money we spend on AI will return to sane levels.
Google has multiple cash firehouses, the small AI companies do not.
tanh 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I’m guessing they’re behind the Chinese models in capability now
chanux 2 hours ago [-]
Just today my Pixel failed to do the right thing on "Set an alarm in 15 minutes" thanks to Gemini. This has worked reliably since Google Assistant was introduced.
27183 1 hours ago [-]
"Hey Siri, find me gas stations along my route" routinely fails now. That worked great for years. Total clown show.
pixl97 2 hours ago [-]
Huge companies tend to make money from network effects, rent seeking, and lock in. They tend to be horrifically bad when it comes to innovation, especially when it may disrupt exiting departments in the company. Those departments will fight for their life and generally muck things up.
Very few companies have leadership that can prevent this infighting and force teams on directed goals.
39 minutes ago [-]
majormajor 1 hours ago [-]
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.
overgard 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Bjorkbat 1 hours ago [-]
One theory I've been entertaining is that whenever GPT-3.5 came out a lot of people were talking about the "bitter lesson" and how scale was all we really needed to get to AGI. No need for any fancy tricks, just release a larger model trained on more data, by the time we released a hypothetical "GPT-5 sized" model we'd have AGI.
Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been playing by this playbook of focusing on scale and training data, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic have done so well because they are likely doing much more interesting things to improve their models over time. It makes sense when you realize that one of Google's key strengths, besides talent, is that they have an incredible amount of data they can use for training due to being both the world's leading search engine as well as having all that video data from YouTube. Scaling the training data makes more sense to them than it does to Anthropic and OpenAI, who are both relatively data-disadvantaged.
You can kind of see this when you look at the Gemini 3 scorecard when it came out (https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/g...) and notice that while it wasn't as good as Claude And GPT at coding, it scored higher on a bunch of other non-coding benchmarks, and I think the reason why is simply because of Google's data advantage.
If true, I feel even more vindicated for believing that the "scale is all we need" narrative was bullshit.
redox99 1 hours ago [-]
Other than attention optimizations and other minor changes, the top Chinese models (which are way better than gemini) have basically the same architecture as GPT2. Of course RL is key for agentic workloads, but I'd say it's correct that progress has been mostly scaling models,adding more data and cleaning it better.
cedws 1 hours ago [-]
Is this not an apples-and-pears comparison? DeepMind is a research lab, not an LLM-pilled money furnace.
deeviant 24 minutes ago [-]
I think it's just more about market incentive. At it's core, LLMs are bad for google's previous business model, which was to send you to as many sites 'good enough' for what you were looking for and plant Ad land mines along the way, in the search results and in the websites themselves.
The new paradigm is you ask the llm a question, get the answer and cutout the middle man. (yes the answer may or may not be as good as the old google result, but for the sake of the argument lets say it is), Google was in danger of simply getting their arm cut off. so they focused on scaling so they could add LLMs to the search, which they largely have. You can't offer an opus like model on something as big as search (and which is offered for 'free'), so they focused on that model, and the infrastructure to run it, because they cannot afford to lose search.
Meanwhile, they know the power of frontier models, they are working to have the infrastructure to be a huge player in them and I'm sure they will have a frontier capable model, eventually. They are playing a longer game, because they can, and I think it's going to work out very well for them.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tonfa 2 hours ago [-]
> OpenAI and Anthropic are essentially offering Monopoly money in the hopes that one day you can exchange it for real money.
I thought employees have already had opportunities to cash out (there's enough funding rounds for that).
(Tho how much you can sell was limited, iirc to double digit millions...)
logicchains 2 hours ago [-]
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.
LZ_Khan 2 hours ago [-]
I've always thought this as well.
abakker 2 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?
jaccola 2 hours ago [-]
What is anticompetitive about it? The comment above is literally claiming they’ve been outcompeted.
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure that's the right way to look at it, given that Google's huge head start in capital and talent did not prevent AI competition at all. It's a demonstration of reasonable, non-problematic dynamics between smaller and larger companies. (Of course, there's an implicit risk here, the folks at Cruise probably worked harder and more passionately than Waymo staff too.)
abakker 2 hours ago [-]
you are right. I guess what I was thinking was that google's bigness was essentially a bad capital allocation strategy, since they were lazy and not motivated by absolute return, but some combination of acceptable risk, politics, personal preferences, etc in a large management team that has seemed...disconnected for quite some time.
They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability is also a handicap when disruption is the objective.
SpicyLemonZest 23 minutes ago [-]
It's a notoriously double edged sword. When you create huge absolute return incentives, you get things like the Airtable acquisition, where everyone's sad that you built a $1.2B company because some investor at some point mistakenly thought it was an $11B company.
wernsey 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
> Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads
Considering these are the best stats they could find, gemini usage+general situation must be really, really bleak.
High demand means nothing. A model being live is nothing to brag about. And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
giancarlostoro 1 hours ago [-]
> Flash is in high demand
I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?
svachalek 55 minutes ago [-]
That said though, Flash isn't it. The prices on the latest flash models put Sonnet and Terra to shame.
kokanee 59 minutes ago [-]
Does everyone want AI?
glitchcrab 49 minutes ago [-]
Single data point; no, I don't. I preferred the pre-AI world. It makes me sad that we'll never see it again.
champagnepapi 18 minutes ago [-]
Personally, In SWE, i think the industry has made a grave mistake with the agents and we're just one big Catastrophe waiting to happen. I do think that there is very real value when software engineers use these tools as something akin to exoskeletons that allow the human to do more, rather than just fully replacing them. However, I'm finding more and more that companies are slop shops and just attempting to automate all of their software engineering. That will certainly end terribly. I hope we are not cannon fodder.
bluGill 46 minutes ago [-]
For what? There are some things I want AI for because it does it well. There are some things I don't want AI for because it just makes a mess (hallucinations). Maybe the next AI will be different and we will have the conversation again.
pferde 32 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, it kills our planet, our culture and our economy extremely well. Oh yes, and some code monkeys enjoy that it can make computer code on the side.
giancarlostoro 27 minutes ago [-]
I guess it should be said, of everyone who wants AI, they don't want to pay the expense for it to the level they want to use it.
WarmWash 20 minutes ago [-]
No.
But people want what AI does for them. It's a tragedy of the commons situation.
simianwords 36 minutes ago [-]
> I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?
I keep seeing this but this line of thinking doesn't make any sense. What does it really mean?
There are expensive models that increase the probability of you doing your task under a lower cost. That means you can't use Gemma for coding your new compiler - it would just be overall costlier.
Heavier models are cheaper at more complicated tasks because they use fewer turns and fewer mistakes.
Cheaper models are more likely to be cheap at less complicated tasks. Like if you just ask Gemma "Hi" it would probably be cheaper than asking Opus.
So what does this statement really mean? People don't want to pay the extra for a more costly model? Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost!
bigyabai 33 minutes ago [-]
> Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost!
Because real Fable usage starts at $20/month, and has oppressive usage limits even at that (ridiculous) monthly price.
Compared to my $3/month GLM-5.2 subscription, I have never felt like I was leaving capabilities on the table by refusing to cough up $20 for 15 minutes of Fable use per day.
epiccoleman 18 seconds ago [-]
where are you subbing to GLM-5.2? i've been meaning to try it out and for $3 it's a no-brainer to just load it up and give it a shot.
simianwords 20 minutes ago [-]
This is the wrong way to look at it. If you have a complicated task , you can solve it for cheaper if you used Fable. It will use fewer turns to achieve the same result.
You can solve it for cheaper if you use GLM but if you are involved in it more, but that defeats the purpose.
gbalduzzi 5 minutes ago [-]
The point is that there aren't many complex tasks were fable delivers a significant value increase over cheaper models.
Single prompting a very complex tasks is rare even on frontier models, because it can be done successfully only for specific situations (e.g. you have a very strong verification step the model can iterate on).
Most of my everyday usage is for smaller takes, were you don't really get the benefit of the most expensive models, and my guess is that is the case for the most users
simianwords 41 seconds ago [-]
> The point is that there aren't many complex tasks were fable delivers a significant value increase over cheaper models.
Strong disagree on this. Any decently complicated task like a refactor is going to be more likely to be solved by Fable than by Gemma 3B or whatever.
I have personally tried to use Sonnet over Opus for tasks and Sonnet gets things right sometimes and at other times I wish I had just paid higher.
This is the standard pattern I keep seeing and I can have a bet with you that it would stay like this.
bigyabai 17 minutes ago [-]
It's not cheaper if the price of admission is $20 for the first taste. And it's definitely not cheaper to pay per-token versus using my GLM-5.2 quota.
simianwords 3 minutes ago [-]
Again this is a resolution problem. Your tasks are small enough that fit into a nice $3 quota. If you are an enterprise or a power user, the right-sizing argument doesn't work.
I'm talking about API prices - subscription is a different game.
jgalt212 1 hours ago [-]
> And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
I have always found NPM download numbers truly suspect. Is no one caching? Are they estimating true number of downloads base on some estimate of cache hits?
sidcool 2 hours ago [-]
Sundar Pichai: @DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs.
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 it.
reasonableklout 2 hours ago [-]
But he's not just Chairman, he's taking the title of Chief Scientist. It sounds more like moving into an IC role.
hyperpape 2 hours ago [-]
The idea that “Chief Scientist” means anything more specific about what he does than “he’s a big shot who was in technology” is misguided.
A chief scientist can be super influential, or a guy who’s on the slow path to retirement but is keeping a paycheck to keep up appearances.
tonfa 2 hours ago [-]
Jeff Dean became Chief Scientist when Demis took over his org.
It's still the typical title as a stepping stone towards something else (often outside).
flakiness 2 hours ago [-]
Chairman is a stepping stone for a retirement/resignation. Apple's Tim Cook. Google's Eric Schmidt. The list goes on.
anvuong 2 hours ago [-]
But Alphabet is just a holding company, what does Chief Scientist of Alphabet even mean?
atonse 2 hours ago [-]
It means "please, he's still here, don't let the stock plummet"
gorn 51 minutes ago [-]
It still did.
frollogaston 23 minutes ago [-]
Could've been a lot worse
throwaw12 49 seconds ago [-]
If you lost your only 2 Senior Fellows, you deserve to be replaced yesterday
ra7 2 hours ago [-]
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.
firasd 10 minutes ago [-]
Who knew the real revenue unlock wouldn’t be based on how much paranoid red-teaming the model underwent to resist users jailbreaking its ‘alignment’, and instead more on whether the model is post-trained to use ‘sed’ and ‘git’? Poor Gemini
Scientist-heavy orgs that want to solve everything in token space may overtook tool use; meanwhile Anthropic has been super focused on MCP, Claude Code etc for over a year
raincole 6 minutes ago [-]
Out of the three main US AI companies' models, Gemini is obviously the less aligned (read: censored). So I really don't know what you're talking about.
thorncorona 10 minutes ago [-]
Gemini isn't as heavily aligned as OAI / Ant models ..?
firasd 6 minutes ago [-]
If you just talk to it over API (no web search) the Gemini models are extremely resistant to thinking the user may be living in a universe outside their training data. Try to discuss any news etc and they assume it’s fake or fiction
xnx 2 hours ago [-]
> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.
Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
Analemma_ 1 hours ago [-]
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?
tuesdaynight 1 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
xnx 54 minutes ago [-]
Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system
basch 44 minutes ago [-]
As much as everyone wants to pay accomplished celebrities, all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves. A guard passing torch can be opportunity.
Now, whether Google is the right environment to nurture, that’s its own quandary.
CamperBob2 52 minutes ago [-]
Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler.
Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other.
A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.
WarmWash 16 minutes ago [-]
Google's weakness (well one of) is its total lack of cohesion. If the Google Books team could, they would sell access to that data in a heartbeat to boost their metrics.
forrestthewoods 59 minutes ago [-]
Whoa. So is Jeff effectively leaving Google to work on this new venture full time? Or is the venture a side project? It sounds like the former. I’m sure he’ll still have internal access as an advisor of sorts. But this feels like a seismic change. Much larger than I initially realized?
clueless 32 minutes ago [-]
it's a new venture that he can then sell back to google, and continue his ongoing loop
48 minutes ago [-]
GodelNumbering 1 hours ago [-]
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 release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen
frollogaston 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
r0b05 18 minutes ago [-]
Maybe they are forced to use Google search.
frollogaston 17 minutes ago [-]
No, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
squidbeak 29 minutes ago [-]
Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
hypnodrones 2 hours ago [-]
Today I saw one of the most talented engineers I know and worked with leave DeepMind and now I probably know part of the "why". Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.
A_D_E_P_T 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market, but it looks more remote than ever. Maybe Hassabis' personal inclination towards AI-for-science, and physics/chemistry in particular -- as opposed to consumer AI and coding AI -- has hurt them commercially.
krapht 2 hours ago [-]
Is Gemini really doomed? I'm still bullish on Google:
1) they have more free cash flow and capital than God due to the ads business
2) they have data - intent from web searches, youtube videos, google books and music
3) they have dedicated inference hardware
for all these reasons, is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? some day the pace of improvement will slow, and google will vacuum up the market. they'll be able to compete with open-weight models just on pure cost advantage from their vertical integration
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
That also own one of the 2 major mobile operating systems, with Gemini tightly integrated and all of the data they can gather from that. Why do you think OpenAI wants to do hardware? Owning delivery is going to be important, and right now, Google and Apple own the delivery mechanisms (to consumers).
They may not capture enterprise use, but I don't think they have to. That's only one piece of the market. AI that's useful to consumers will still get delivered via a smartphone, and Google is in a great place to capture that.
I also don't think LLMs have to be a "winner takes all" situation. Value isn't going to come from having direct access to a chatbot or selling API inference, value is going to be in the form of a specific product (for most, devs aside here). Something a consumer, or a non-tech business can buy off the shelf and plug and play. A "ready made" customer service agent system, a "ready made" BI platform using AI, etc.
For consumers, that's probably going to look like whatever is bundled and tightly integrated into their mobile OS of choice.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
"Doomed" no, but it's pretty clear that they just had a bad cycle and are struggling to keep up with the frontier.
Whether this happened because they bet on "world models -> better reasoning" and that bet didn't pay off, or failed a frontier run for technical reasons like OpenAI did with 4.5, or something else went down? We don't know.
Will they bleed talent, fall further behind until they give up, or clean the organizational and infrastructural cobwebs and get back in the saddle? We don't know.
kaoD 59 minutes ago [-]
> struggling to keep up with the frontier
I think the question is whether that's even relevant.
If AI becomes a commodity (will it?) you're better off being Google than OpenAI.
Microsoft struggled to keep up with the mobile industry frontier and here they are, healthier than ever.
fluidcruft 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know if they are doomed but https://isaiprofitable.com/ seems concerning about Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.
watwut 2 hours ago [-]
> is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage?
Yeah, this is one of the things I find so weird on the discourse. If you get there negligeably later, but without astonishing spend and waste, you might even be better off in the long term.
peterlk 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it matters that much for Google. They need to not fall hopelessly behind, but I don’t think there’s a strong economic reason for Google to burn the kind of capex that the frontier labs are burning. Strategically, I think they’re probably doing better than OpenAI and Anthropic. The Gemini models are open, and they are what researchers are working with (see neuronpedia as an example). Over time, this will give them a strategic advantage for the same reasons that open source wins over proprietary. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have massive capex that needs to be returned to investors while their margins are being undercut by Kimi/Deepseek/Qwen. Google can wait around for the coming frontier lab profitability crisis and cruise right on by with their Apple contract and owned data centers to pick up the pieces and exceed the existing frontier labs.
The world doesn’t realize how desperately compute-crunched hyperscalers are to meet AI demand.
This is a better problem to have than SpaceX, which is renting out capacity obviously because it’s own AI products aren’t selling.
tokioyoyo 2 hours ago [-]
"The company raised its full-year 2026 capex forecast to between $195 billion and $205 billion, with further significant increases planned for 2027." - Alphabet.
asdfman123 56 minutes ago [-]
I think ~$200B is just for AI infrastructure capex. Fun fact: that's nearly what the 3rd largest military in the world (Russia) is spending on a land war in Europe.
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
This is against a $500B+ backlog of demand, which is mostly from OAI and Anthropic.
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
- They're making a lot of money selling Tensor to Anthropic. If Nvidia's $4T market cap is justifiable, Google's position as one of the other top AI chip seller is worth a lot.
- In a world where open source Chinese models decimate Frontier models ability to charge a high price, it's the operators of efficient inference data centers that will win. Like Google
- Google is probably the biggest provider of "free" AI because it's on Google.com. That forces them to focus on cost. And in a commodity market, low-cost providers are the ones that make the money.
jorvi 2 hours ago [-]
Google doesn't need to compete. 'everyone' is locked into them via the Gapps (mostly Gmail and Maps) and Android ecosystems. Same with Apple, and Microsoft on the B2B side. It's only Anthropic, OpenAI and everyone else that _need_ to compete because switching models is painless. And they have no other revenue streams.
10 years from now, its gonna be Google, Apple and Microsoft left standing in the AI game. Well, until the US wakes up and starts attempting to break the oligopoly like the EU has recently started to do.
chasd00 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mlmonkey 2 hours ago [-]
They are not "asleep at the wheel"; it's just that the people in charge (the "MBA types") have no clue what to do!
There's an old saying, if you judge a fish's smarts by how well it can ride a bicycle, it will always seem dumb.
The people who have risen to the top of at Google are built for a different environment than what's needed right now. They are good at playing their political games, sabotaging each other, etc.; i.e. all of the petty games that managers play in big companies. But the AI era demands a different skill set: how to bring together incredibly smart people and forge them into a battle group that will achieve victory in the ongoing battle for AGI! It's as if you have built an army of tanks, but the next battle is being fought on the high seas.
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
Boeing has had smart engineers around the entire time, too.
The group running the company, is the company.
thereitgoes456 2 hours ago [-]
I largely agree but I don't know if it's quite so clear cut. From the pricing angle, all competitors except Google, including Chinese models, have incentive to gain market share at all costs, and may be serving tokens at or below cost. I am not sure though, Google could certainly decrease prices if they wanted to.
For agentic work, but especially for web search, 3.6 Flash has an important leg up, its fast speed, that no other model comes close to matching. I guess nobody pays attention to it because it's not the one big flashy number that you compare to other models.
stevedonovan 2 hours ago [-]
The default model they are using for Web search is getting capable and is very visible. And now it invites people to keep asking questions.
They are quietly trying to become the chatbot that everyone uses to look things up. That strikes me as an intelligent move - not everything has to be done by an expensive frontier model.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
I’m wondering if they just don’t believe that there is a good business model to be made as a frontier AI lab
I disagree - I will be surprised if google doesnt win the AI race long term. They have the money, the chips, and the ability to attract talent.
hypnodrones 2 hours ago [-]
Agree that I would (and do) still place my bet on them for the long term. Maybe the outcome will be a couple of good startups seeded and DeepMind _really_ focusing on LLMs now.
nemomarx 2 hours ago [-]
Are they measurably attracting more talent here? It seems like they're losing some of it right now, so is there public info about numbers of researchers they have or etc
rdtsc 2 hours ago [-]
I said that too at the start of the year, but that's a looong time in "AI years". I feel like by now they should have announced a Fable-killer model. They may still do it but looking back I am becoming less convinced now than I was 6 months ago.
gboss 2 hours ago [-]
Ever heard of the innovator’s dilemma? Don’t underestimate the inertia of large companies and their unwillingness to pivot from their cash cow.
jerlam 2 hours ago [-]
Google specifically has a track record. You could have made the same argument about social media (Google+) a decade ago.
krapht 2 hours ago [-]
social media is a completely different market though - since there are massive returns to scale, it's incredibly hard for a new entrant to break in.
model training and inference is the opposite. people switch LLMs like people change clothes in the morning. there are popular services (openrouter) that make moving as easy as changing a model string.
baq 2 hours ago [-]
Demis will get an offer he can’t refuse - they’ll make him the CEO of Alphabet and have the whole company go all in - the question is when.
xnx 2 hours ago [-]
How is the company not "all in" now? Google is going to spend $200B on AI buildout this year.
temp_praneshp 56 minutes ago [-]
Doesn't mean much for DeepMind if that's spent on Google Cloud, to rent out for Anthropic et al.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
If the new cow doesn’t have cash, it is better to stick to the cow you know.
keeda 1 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately the new cow is cannibalizing the old cow, so Google is in a bit of a bind here. (So far I cannot imagine them monetizing AI overviews enough to compensate for the sharp loss of ads on SERPs.)
To its credit Google seems willing to disrupt itself before its competitors can.
andsoitis 15 minutes ago [-]
Maybe they should become vegetarian
logicchains 2 hours ago [-]
They also have the money, the hardware and the talent to be the best cloud infrastructure provider, yet they're still far behind AWS (for good reason, as anyone who's dealt with their customer service will understand).
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
They’d be hard pressed to lose, if it’s what they want.
They need to route all browser search strings to an LLM, and slowly begin to charge where people will pay. Likely ad space.
reducesuffering 2 hours ago [-]
> ability to attract talent.
No, the top talent is clearly at Anthropic and OpenAI
artemonster 2 hours ago [-]
why?
hypnodrones 2 hours ago [-]
It seems that people wanting to focus on AI-for-science instead of topping LLM benchmarks don't have a place anymore in DeepMind.
2 hours ago [-]
cute_boi 2 hours ago [-]
If cursor can train model, I see no reason Google can't do it. They just have to hire more people and try on multiple angle.
tacomonstrous 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone commenting here seems to take this to mean he's leaving Google, when that's not what the article says.
brokencode 2 hours ago [-]
Clearly his influence is going to be less though.
And most likely this is a calculated step to avoid freaking people out, even though he is effectively leaving.
baq 2 hours ago [-]
Not at all clear.
To me it looks like he’ll be in a position to actually be unhobble DeepMind - reminder DM was sitting on a ChatGPT product for a whole year before ChatGPT got released (LMChat) and Google didn’t let them release it.
sailingparrot 1 hours ago [-]
> DM was sitting on a ChatGPT product for a whole year before ChatGPT got released (LMChat) and Google didn’t let them release it.
Heard this multiple time, to me this is pure history rewriting and post-rationalization.
OpenAI also had a internal chat app before chatgpt, Microsoft had multiple, a bunch of other players also had internal chatgpt equivalents + many startups built some using OAI API.
The breakthrough of ChatGPT wasnt because OAI were the first to think of that (absolutely obvious and basic) product, it was because they were the first to get a model strong enough to be actually useful to talk to, vs a mere fun novelty.
There is no evidence whatsoever that DM ever had such a model that they decide not to talk about/release.
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
OAI was the first to throw safety to the wind.
Everyone else was scared to unleashed it on the general public because it was too powerful with too many unknowns (in ~2022, hindsight is different)
Altman didn't give a fuck, first mover was more important to him.
Davidzheng 1 hours ago [-]
if him leaving unhobbles gdm, it'll be because he has less influence...
VirusNewbie 1 hours ago [-]
What? His influence is going to be larger.
brokencode 1 hours ago [-]
Larger in what sense? He is stepping away from the day to day operation of the company.
He won’t have any authority in the company other than leading and voting in board meetings.
paxys 2 hours ago [-]
I’m willing to bet a lot of money that the “chairman” role is a contractual obligation and he be will be gone the day it expires.
k1rd 1 hours ago [-]
omg, you are right, he is leaving google!
toshinoriyagi 2 hours ago [-]
Deepmind always worked on some of the coolest architectures. Following things like AlphaStar, AlphaGo, and more were extremely exciting and felt like the hacker persona of machine learning. I hope Google can take advantage of this awesome team. They've done incredible work.
Publicity benefit corporation HAHAHA typo, think they mean public benefit corporation. Anthropic however is DEFINITELY a publicity benefit corporation.
paxys 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nsagent 20 minutes ago [-]
Considering Hassabis co-founded Deepmind to pursue AGI, I take this pivot as a tacit understanding on his part that Deepmind isn't on a path towards AGI in the near future. They might at some point, but they cannot be close in his estimation, otherwise why leave now?
mherrmann 29 minutes ago [-]
At least judging from the headlines, it seems Google is far behind on AI. Fable/GPT 5.6 and recently Kimi get a lot of attention, solve long-standing math problems and lead in coding. It seems that Google's supposed advantages of very deep pockets, original talent, vast amounts of data and unmatched distribution are really not making that much of a difference. What is going wrong?
rossdavidh 2 hours ago [-]
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?
WarmWash 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
chasd00 1 hours ago [-]
Why form a "Public Benefit Corporation"? There must be some kind of access available that a regular for-profit corporation is excluded from. Politics perhaps? AI tells me PBCs can be shielded from shareholder lawsuits. Also "Founders can maintain vision control even as outside venture capital enters the cap table".
Seems like a good way to spend investor dollars without consequences while maintaining control. Maybe a bit cynical but i can't figure out why they'd form a PBC over anything else.
lebovic 38 minutes ago [-]
I formed a PBC and worked at a well-known PBC. Personally, I opted for a PBC because I liked that I could balance a specific cause with shareholder benefit.
In most cases, it doesn't really matter. The board + management is still in charge, and they have significant legal leeway regardless of the structure. But there's little additional cost to opt for a PBC, and it does give you more legal defensibility to be truly mission driven. Standard C Corps weren't really intended for mission driven companies (see the shareholder primacy norm).
I think it's popular for AI startups, because many great researchers understand the risks involved, and they don't want what they build to be controlled solely for shareholder benefit.
While non-profits are also an option for a mission driven org, it's harder to raise the large amounts of cash that some AI startups need, and laws around deferred compensation and private inurement (e.g. options-like structures) make employee compensation harder.
erikgaas 53 minutes ago [-]
The important part is PBCs protect you from a shareholder primacy directive. Eric Ries describes it in his new book, but the example he gives is if the most evil company you know tried to buy out your company you have to do it in a normal "best practices" C corp because it is your fiduciary duty. PBC helps prevent that based on your declared mission statement. If the sale doesn't facilitate your mission then you aren't obligated to sell.
650 2 hours ago [-]
The first sentence is quite telling
>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…
Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought
giwook 2 hours ago [-]
My opinion is that you're reading way too much into this. Talent is obviously first. Without that you have no products worth speaking of.
Terr_ 33 minutes ago [-]
It just tells you about their intended audience: Investors rather than consumers.
Nowadays, every company—even huge ones—prefers to be seen as a "growth opportunity", so they are trying to play up their ability to create new products which will somehow be so incredible that the line keeps moving up forever.
That said, there is definitely a correlation between companies chasing new products and leaving old ones to become crap.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Hasn't that always been the case with Google? Outside of a few that are mostly good and have stuck around, I've always seen Google has having great tech but being quite bad and making products out of it.
bonsai_bar 36 minutes ago [-]
I'd bet my mortgage that if the first sentence was "We've got amazing products, amazing talent, and world-class compute", you'd be in the comments complaining that they didn't put talent first.
garlic_enjoyer 2 hours ago [-]
I was about to invest in Google, but your compelling observation has swayed me. Now it's obvious to me they are a dying company.
zdragnar 1 hours ago [-]
A company is made up of people, and makes products. Products can come and go for many reasons (or any reason) but the company will always have people.
JacobAsmuth 1 hours ago [-]
So then it is similarly telling that compute is second on the list? They have more talent than compute? Layoffs incoming?
cj 1 hours ago [-]
This is also how Y Combinator operates.
Founders are first. Ideas are second.
add-sub-mul-div 2 hours ago [-]
If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?
scrlk 2 hours ago [-]
What happened to the "strike team" that Sergey Brin was leading to try and improve Gemini's coding performance?
frollogaston 8 minutes ago [-]
still waiting on ganpati propagation (jk)
chanux 1 hours ago [-]
They tried so hard and got so far..
luisln 1 hours ago [-]
If all the other AI companies are promising AGI by Q4 of next year, what else can you do to satisfy shareholders than also jump on that same bandwagon?
1 hours ago [-]
geephroh 33 minutes ago [-]
Dunno what the longer term effects of this and the other departures will be, but in the world of vibe-finance Alphabet dumped 4.15% of share value as of this minute.
antirez 2 hours ago [-]
Chinese labs are the proof that there is no need of big names, but of the right mindset and agility. It's those last things that Google truly misses, but now they are missing for a long time, and outside the AI divisions too, in almost every department of the company.
utopcell 2 hours ago [-]
Demis stepped down? Who cares? Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google. We are in uncharted territory.
FartyMcFarter 1 hours ago [-]
I think Demis has been way more influential in the past decade. Jeff and Sanjay built a lot of Google's foundational software, but that was a long time ago.
utopcell 40 minutes ago [-]
Demis is great -- this is not a zero-sum game. Who built what, and the relative importance, is an interesting discussion to have, but it's orthogonal to my point.
Which is: When you think about Google, true, old, "don't be evil", tech excellence Google, you don't think about Demis. You think about Jeff's and Sanjay's geeky, technically uncompromising, faces.
bkishan 2 hours ago [-]
By the article, it looks like he's actually stepping up.
stabbles 2 hours ago [-]
Your comment says he's stepping up, the HN title says he's stepping down, the article says he's stepping aside. Nobody says if it's a step forward or backward.
FartyMcFarter 1 hours ago [-]
We know he's definitely stepping. That's a start.
bink 2 hours ago [-]
It's just a jump to the left...
dwroberts 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I actually read this more as them scrambling because Jeff Dean is leaving? Because that is the role he is taking up
sailingparrot 1 hours ago [-]
There is no way a Chief Scientist (essentially IC) role is more important than leading the whole of DeepMind, 6000 people strong, working on the most important product for the future of Alphabet.
This means Demis wanted a change and to work on other things, it's not Google wanting this.
dwroberts 1 hours ago [-]
Dean has pretty big symbolic importance inside of Google regardless of what his role title is/was
Makes sense to me... leaving to start their company with Google being an investor.
Clayton Christensen [1] says (paraphrasing) it's a good idea to spin-off (or invest) in a startup that you've a say on, before the ecosystem sprouts a seemingly-non-entity and gently disrupts your market.
Interestingly (diff strategies i guess) Apple tends to acquire (Q.ai) rather than invest/venture (as google in OP).
[1] The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
eamag 2 hours ago [-]
Google's stock dropped 5% right away, 200billion of value
aix1 2 hours ago [-]
It's weird for an announcement like this to drop in the middle of a trading day. I wonder if it got leaked, forcing the timing.
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
And? I bought more. This is excellent news.
This over-reaction is why people can't see over a long time horizon.
This is great news for Google as they realize that Sundar is the problem and he will soon leave Google for Demis to be the new CEO of Alphabet (Google) which I am predicting. [0]
AI is critically important to Google, but there's a lot more to Google than just having a frontier AI model. Do Demis skills line up with what the whole company needs? It's going to be tough to beat Sundar's 1200% increase in stock price.
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago [-]
I sold out of my position. I can imagine a story where it works out in the long term, but I don't see how this doesn't cause terrible retention problems in the short to medium term. I felt a pull to launch a startup when I heard Jeff Dean was leaving, and I'm a long time big corp employee who hasn't been at Google in over a decade.
mupuff1234 2 hours ago [-]
Why would they do this extra step if that were the case?
peter422 2 hours ago [-]
In theory I think the stock should be going up because his tenure has found Google getting left behind.
nphardon 2 hours ago [-]
Wow we just had a post on here a couple weeks ago about Jeff Dean supporting dissident voices at Google.
mlmonkey 1 hours ago [-]
Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs.
Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays.
It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.
WarmWash 11 minutes ago [-]
He is probably itching to get to Anthropic. After all he is one of the early investors too.
1 hours ago [-]
returnInfinity 49 minutes ago [-]
As what? CEO? Demis will not take up the MTS role.
tibbar 12 minutes ago [-]
The labs are all very interested in bio right now. Demis is working on Isomorphic rn (Google's version of that) but I could imagine a lab tempting him away to work on their equivalent if it had stronger momentum
brcmthrowaway 54 minutes ago [-]
He was a protected entity (tambram)
bsdpython 2 hours ago [-]
Jeff Dean leaving Google should be the headline but big news all around for Google AI nonetheless
htrp 2 hours ago [-]
Hassabis is being promoted to Chair of Deepmind
heaney-555 2 hours ago [-]
The Gemini 3.5 Pro delay has been catastrophic for Google. I'm really curious what has gone on behind the scenes there.
But missing out right as AI coding agents become genuinely deeply capable and useful is just an immense failure.
rdiddly 1 hours ago [-]
Welp, the market didn't like that. GOOG dropped about 5% on that news.
tosh 2 hours ago [-]
can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
colesantiago 2 hours ago [-]
It is good for Demis and Google overall.
This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era.
Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms.
The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.
junesix 2 hours ago [-]
I don't see Demis becoming CEO. He's a scientist and researcher. He wouldn't want to be bogged down by minutiae of corporate politics, org structure, government relations, mobile hardware, etc. Chair lets him have authority to explore any path of interest without overhead of operations.
sashank_1509 2 hours ago [-]
I agree sundar will step down but I’m not sure if this means they’re grooming Demis to takeover. I suspect not, and someone else might take over.
tonfa 1 hours ago [-]
Similar to how Sundar was promoted, isn't it more likely to be a promotion from existing leadership (one of the product leads/SVP).
lokar 2 hours ago [-]
My impression, inside and out of G, was that Sundar (and Ruth) were about scaling down R&D expenses (as a fraction of revenue), and focusing on exploiting the monopolies.
Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.
stevemk14ebr 35 minutes ago [-]
You're crazy of you think Demis is CEO of alphabet material. He's an accomplished AI researcher, Google does about 10000 other things than AI.
jdross 15 minutes ago [-]
Demis is CEO of Alphabet material. He would be exceptional in that role, and Google would be wise to put him there
aix1 2 hours ago [-]
> this could be a path for Demis to be CEO in the future in the AI era
His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no?
P.S. I think his real interest is Isomorphic, and his new role will offer fewer distractions.
JacobAsmuth 1 hours ago [-]
> mobile era CEO
He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.
tosh 2 hours ago [-]
ty!
htrp 2 hours ago [-]
Between Shazeer and these guys
Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads
real-hacker 1 hours ago [-]
AI hurts ads money.
It's a classic Innovators' dillema.
0x70run 1 hours ago [-]
miss me with the AGI nonsense
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
Absolute earthquake at Deepmind the last few months...
FartyMcFarter 2 hours ago [-]
What do you mean?
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
If you search "Deepmind departures" you'll see a string of high profile ones. This is also coupled with the numerous 3.5 pro delays (and strongly suspected underperformance when released).
Something was definitely going down internally.
segmondy 2 hours ago [-]
they are not going to get rewarded as much as they will make going to openai or anthropic. Google is not insane to pay tens and hundreds of millions to individuals like Zuck is. Crazy as it seems, Zuck might have been right, they seem to have stepped back into the arena with Muse.
huntertwo 2 hours ago [-]
There is no Gemini 3.5 pro despite multiple announcements?
wmf 2 hours ago [-]
He's failing up and out of the blast zone. He won't be responsible if Gemini 4 fails.
epolanski 2 hours ago [-]
That's..huge. Hassabis has been the most important figure of the last 15 years in AI.
Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
rwalll 44 minutes ago [-]
Real next chapters:
1) Repair search that had been broken by AI initiatives.
2) Include less invasive AI with ads for those that need to be spoon fed.
3) Pretend to work on AGI and data centers in space.
4) Sell shovels and TPUs to the gold diggers.
allthetime 18 minutes ago [-]
1) I think about this a lot. The AI overview has already destroyed the need to even look further down the page for a lot of people. And if you look further down the page, there is often a whole page of AI generated blog spam, which is in turn being regurgitated by the AI overview up-top. The AI overview often regurgitates a completely false reddit comment from two days ago as well. That AI generated blog spam is probably reading the AI overview.
Where do real results live?
throwaw12 2 hours ago [-]
This move was expected when Google shifted focus to Gemini-only.
tanh 2 hours ago [-]
I guess Demis was about world models and the old talent saw the writing on the wall. Noam was a big one and this is just a continuation of that.
Don’t understand how Sundar is still running things, though.
Mistletoe 1 hours ago [-]
Lots of talk of us being at the cusp of AGI, but how will we even know when we get there? When AGI develops a religion for itself?
FiddlyPack 1 hours ago [-]
That's the fun part. We don't. Could have happened 10 years ago without us noticing. I don't expect my skin cells to be able to recognize "me" anymore than I expect we will be able to recognize a superintelligent AGI. If it arrived 10 years ago, then the last 10 years could simply be its PR campaign. We wouldn't even be able to tell if it was successfully achieving its "goals" or not, assuming an AGI even has "goals"
gverrilla 10 minutes ago [-]
Science fiction.
VCFundedGenYer 1 hours ago [-]
Can we please stop saying anything about "AGI"? I remember when people would be like "AGI in 3 months" / "AGI in 2024" / "AGI is confirmed in 2025" like stop, you don't know if it's even a thing, let alone if it's coming/imminent.
paulpan 1 hours ago [-]
Hugely disappointing and shocking news. Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar. A move of this magnitude couldn't have been made without consent of Larry and Sergey, so it makes me wonder why from their perspective.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.
frollogaston 9 minutes ago [-]
I think most people consider AI a threat to Google's business
ddp26 2 hours ago [-]
I would have thought Jeff Dean would never ever leave Google. What on earth is going on?
amberjack 2 hours ago [-]
So how many people from DeepMind have left now? Not looking too good for Google.
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
The momentum is not being conserved here.
2 hours ago [-]
sgt101 1 hours ago [-]
"Onwards!"
These guys...
next_xibalba 1 hours ago [-]
My uninformed hypothesis: Demis was gently pushed out. Gemini, while having made major strides over the last year, continues to lag behind Anthropic and OpenAI.
adolph 2 hours ago [-]
"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.
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.
owlninja 2 hours ago [-]
I think he was referring to an obvious typo "publicity benefit corporation"
tonfa 1 hours ago [-]
Google is just an investor, it's not a subsidiary.
dyauspitr 2 hours ago [-]
This doesn’t sound like stepping down this sounds like stepping up within Google.
tonfa 1 hours ago [-]
It usually isn't, Chairman doesn't involve day to day supervision and decision making.
When Eric Schmidt became chairman or Ruth Porat became president, this was more a transition towards less involvement than an increase of impact.
VirusNewbie 1 hours ago [-]
He means the chief scientist part. Before Demis had no influence on cloud, tpu development, day to day dev tools, etc.
Let's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?
dominotw 1 hours ago [-]
when you attack the king make sure to kill the king.
Demis tried to be google ceo by pumping out self aggrandizing 'documentaries' and highfalutin interviews where said a whole bunch of nothing.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
Two thoughts on this.
First, it is incredibly difficult to pivot a large organization because there are too many competing interests, too many fiefdoms people have built and too much organizational inertia. A new company has the advantage of a singularity of purpose. Google has to compete with internal interests about AI disrupting search, ad revenue and so on. This can slow you down and limit the resources you get. It's why companies get disrupted, particularly when they reach monopoly status. Steve jobs said it best [1].
Second, Gogole's path here (IMHO) is to make their own hardware. They've already done this with their TPUs but need to be able to compete with NVidia offerings. NVidia controlling the price, features and, most importantly, who gets to buy them is bad for Google. This is what Google should be pouring billions into.
The beauty of this is that success is easily measurable against metrics like price-per-petaflops, performance-per-Watt and so on. Throw money at some key Nvidia engineers and have them design silicon for you for TSMC to fab.
I still believe that Google is positioned to survive the (IMHO) inevitable AI bubble popping.
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.
At some point we have to all accept that powerful AI is most likely dangerous AI as well, almost by definition.
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/05/31/google-ai-...
[2] - https://www.axios.com/2024/02/23/google-gemini-images-stereo...
They could really use some encouraging news about the competitiveness of their AI lab.
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.
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.
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.
Google spending money on competing head to head with your LLMs is a waste of money for Google. If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both. All the investors throwing money into OpenAI, Anthropic, are just accidentally subsidizing Google's product development. Google shouldn't spend its AI research capital in an arms race with Anthropic but instead should invest in AI approaches that no one else is investigating at scale. That way Google can hedge against LLMs hitting a wall.
There is a real but small danger to Google that Anthropic replaces Google as a search engine, but that is an uphill fight for Anthropic. Google has massive brand recognition, network effects with gmail and chrome, Anthropic can't just copy what works from Google. On the other hand Google can copy what works for Anthropic. Google would have to play poorly to lose that fight.
Probably the worse case for Google is that software becomes so cheap and easy to create and maintain that all of Google's product offerings become commoditized. Even in that world Google has a lock on infrastructure. Perhaps ASI software creation completely removes that as well? If so we are living in a post-singularity world and probably the stockmarket doesn't exist anymore either.
Right now AI companies are competing to make LLMs better at graduate-school level tasks. They all can already competently tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or when the first Led Zeppelin album was released.
Google buys Anthropic for cheap? How?
My case is based on the assumption that Anthropic will not hit RSI or if it does RSI rapidly hits a wall. Faster your growth curve, the faster you eat all the low hanging fruit and s-curve. I could be wrong here, maybe RSI will cause a hard takeoff singularity by 2030 and just keep going, but if that happens the world fundamentally changes.
Not all change is good, as proven by Zuckerberg's response after the lackluster Llama 4 release. The radical restructuring appears to have made things worse.
Yes it's a huge company.
So they are slower. Then they will surface it across their massive product base and keep generating cash. While having a hand in Anthropic and others via investment anyway.
Google doesn't need to offer you the bleeding edge at startup pace. They're playing a different game. When the bubble pops they will be well positioned really no matter the outcome to continue to capitalize as their competitors implode or get absorbed.
The idea a delay is a "complete and unmitigated disaster" is just laughable. People have been saying this about Google since ChatGPT first invaded the public consciousness. Google will continue to do well, the histrionics of people like you aside.
Google has multiple cash firehouses, the small AI companies do not.
Very few companies have leadership that can prevent this infighting and force teams on directed goals.
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.
Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been playing by this playbook of focusing on scale and training data, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic have done so well because they are likely doing much more interesting things to improve their models over time. It makes sense when you realize that one of Google's key strengths, besides talent, is that they have an incredible amount of data they can use for training due to being both the world's leading search engine as well as having all that video data from YouTube. Scaling the training data makes more sense to them than it does to Anthropic and OpenAI, who are both relatively data-disadvantaged.
You can kind of see this when you look at the Gemini 3 scorecard when it came out (https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/g...) and notice that while it wasn't as good as Claude And GPT at coding, it scored higher on a bunch of other non-coding benchmarks, and I think the reason why is simply because of Google's data advantage.
If true, I feel even more vindicated for believing that the "scale is all we need" narrative was bullshit.
The new paradigm is you ask the llm a question, get the answer and cutout the middle man. (yes the answer may or may not be as good as the old google result, but for the sake of the argument lets say it is), Google was in danger of simply getting their arm cut off. so they focused on scaling so they could add LLMs to the search, which they largely have. You can't offer an opus like model on something as big as search (and which is offered for 'free'), so they focused on that model, and the infrastructure to run it, because they cannot afford to lose search.
Meanwhile, they know the power of frontier models, they are working to have the infrastructure to be a huge player in them and I'm sure they will have a frontier capable model, eventually. They are playing a longer game, because they can, and I think it's going to work out very well for them.
I thought employees have already had opportunities to cash out (there's enough funding rounds for that).
(Tho how much you can sell was limited, iirc to double digit millions...)
They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability is also a handicap when disruption is the objective.
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
Considering these are the best stats they could find, gemini usage+general situation must be really, really bleak.
High demand means nothing. A model being live is nothing to brag about. And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete
I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?
But people want what AI does for them. It's a tragedy of the commons situation.
I keep seeing this but this line of thinking doesn't make any sense. What does it really mean?
There are expensive models that increase the probability of you doing your task under a lower cost. That means you can't use Gemma for coding your new compiler - it would just be overall costlier.
Heavier models are cheaper at more complicated tasks because they use fewer turns and fewer mistakes.
Cheaper models are more likely to be cheap at less complicated tasks. Like if you just ask Gemma "Hi" it would probably be cheaper than asking Opus.
So what does this statement really mean? People don't want to pay the extra for a more costly model? Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost!
Because real Fable usage starts at $20/month, and has oppressive usage limits even at that (ridiculous) monthly price.
Compared to my $3/month GLM-5.2 subscription, I have never felt like I was leaving capabilities on the table by refusing to cough up $20 for 15 minutes of Fable use per day.
You can solve it for cheaper if you use GLM but if you are involved in it more, but that defeats the purpose.
Single prompting a very complex tasks is rare even on frontier models, because it can be done successfully only for specific situations (e.g. you have a very strong verification step the model can iterate on).
Most of my everyday usage is for smaller takes, were you don't really get the benefit of the most expensive models, and my guess is that is the case for the most users
Strong disagree on this. Any decently complicated task like a refactor is going to be more likely to be solved by Fable than by Gemma 3B or whatever.
I have personally tried to use Sonnet over Opus for tasks and Sonnet gets things right sometimes and at other times I wish I had just paid higher.
This is the standard pattern I keep seeing and I can have a bet with you that it would stay like this.
I'm talking about API prices - subscription is a different game.
I have always found NPM download numbers truly suspect. Is no one caching? Are they estimating true number of downloads base on some estimate of cache hits?
https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2085033425736745093
So it's not stepping down, right?
So yes fancy title, but basically, someone who can move the stock price is quitting and we're trying to ease the perception of it.
A chief scientist can be super influential, or a guy who’s on the slow path to retirement but is keeping a paycheck to keep up appearances.
It's still the typical title as a stepping stone towards something else (often outside).
The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
Scientist-heavy orgs that want to solve everything in token space may overtook tool use; meanwhile Anthropic has been super focused on MCP, Claude Code etc for over a year
Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
Now, whether Google is the right environment to nurture, that’s its own quandary.
Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other.
A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.
And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL
Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen
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 everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market, but it looks more remote than ever. Maybe Hassabis' personal inclination towards AI-for-science, and physics/chemistry in particular -- as opposed to consumer AI and coding AI -- has hurt them commercially.
for all these reasons, is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? some day the pace of improvement will slow, and google will vacuum up the market. they'll be able to compete with open-weight models just on pure cost advantage from their vertical integration
They may not capture enterprise use, but I don't think they have to. That's only one piece of the market. AI that's useful to consumers will still get delivered via a smartphone, and Google is in a great place to capture that.
I also don't think LLMs have to be a "winner takes all" situation. Value isn't going to come from having direct access to a chatbot or selling API inference, value is going to be in the form of a specific product (for most, devs aside here). Something a consumer, or a non-tech business can buy off the shelf and plug and play. A "ready made" customer service agent system, a "ready made" BI platform using AI, etc.
For consumers, that's probably going to look like whatever is bundled and tightly integrated into their mobile OS of choice.
Whether this happened because they bet on "world models -> better reasoning" and that bet didn't pay off, or failed a frontier run for technical reasons like OpenAI did with 4.5, or something else went down? We don't know.
Will they bleed talent, fall further behind until they give up, or clean the organizational and infrastructural cobwebs and get back in the saddle? We don't know.
I think the question is whether that's even relevant.
If AI becomes a commodity (will it?) you're better off being Google than OpenAI.
Microsoft struggled to keep up with the mobile industry frontier and here they are, healthier than ever.
Yeah, this is one of the things I find so weird on the discourse. If you get there negligeably later, but without astonishing spend and waste, you might even be better off in the long term.
This is in addition to bumping their CapEx spend to the extent their cash flow turned negative for the first time ever this quarter: https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-had-its-f...
The world doesn’t realize how desperately compute-crunched hyperscalers are to meet AI demand.
This is a better problem to have than SpaceX, which is renting out capacity obviously because it’s own AI products aren’t selling.
- In a world where open source Chinese models decimate Frontier models ability to charge a high price, it's the operators of efficient inference data centers that will win. Like Google
- Google is probably the biggest provider of "free" AI because it's on Google.com. That forces them to focus on cost. And in a commodity market, low-cost providers are the ones that make the money.
10 years from now, its gonna be Google, Apple and Microsoft left standing in the AI game. Well, until the US wakes up and starts attempting to break the oligopoly like the EU has recently started to do.
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.
There's an old saying, if you judge a fish's smarts by how well it can ride a bicycle, it will always seem dumb.
The people who have risen to the top of at Google are built for a different environment than what's needed right now. They are good at playing their political games, sabotaging each other, etc.; i.e. all of the petty games that managers play in big companies. But the AI era demands a different skill set: how to bring together incredibly smart people and forge them into a battle group that will achieve victory in the ongoing battle for AGI! It's as if you have built an army of tanks, but the next battle is being fought on the high seas.
The group running the company, is the company.
For agentic work, but especially for web search, 3.6 Flash has an important leg up, its fast speed, that no other model comes close to matching. I guess nobody pays attention to it because it's not the one big flashy number that you compare to other models.
They are quietly trying to become the chatbot that everyone uses to look things up. That strikes me as an intelligent move - not everything has to be done by an expensive frontier model.
Edit: hmm, no, they seem to be mentioning AGI and frontier models in https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...
model training and inference is the opposite. people switch LLMs like people change clothes in the morning. there are popular services (openrouter) that make moving as easy as changing a model string.
To its credit Google seems willing to disrupt itself before its competitors can.
They need to route all browser search strings to an LLM, and slowly begin to charge where people will pay. Likely ad space.
No, the top talent is clearly at Anthropic and OpenAI
And most likely this is a calculated step to avoid freaking people out, even though he is effectively leaving.
To me it looks like he’ll be in a position to actually be unhobble DeepMind - reminder DM was sitting on a ChatGPT product for a whole year before ChatGPT got released (LMChat) and Google didn’t let them release it.
Heard this multiple time, to me this is pure history rewriting and post-rationalization. OpenAI also had a internal chat app before chatgpt, Microsoft had multiple, a bunch of other players also had internal chatgpt equivalents + many startups built some using OAI API.
The breakthrough of ChatGPT wasnt because OAI were the first to think of that (absolutely obvious and basic) product, it was because they were the first to get a model strong enough to be actually useful to talk to, vs a mere fun novelty.
There is no evidence whatsoever that DM ever had such a model that they decide not to talk about/release.
Everyone else was scared to unleashed it on the general public because it was too powerful with too many unknowns (in ~2022, hindsight is different)
Altman didn't give a fuck, first mover was more important to him.
He won’t have any authority in the company other than leading and voting in board meetings.
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...
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?
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.
Seems like a good way to spend investor dollars without consequences while maintaining control. Maybe a bit cynical but i can't figure out why they'd form a PBC over anything else.
In most cases, it doesn't really matter. The board + management is still in charge, and they have significant legal leeway regardless of the structure. But there's little additional cost to opt for a PBC, and it does give you more legal defensibility to be truly mission driven. Standard C Corps weren't really intended for mission driven companies (see the shareholder primacy norm).
I think it's popular for AI startups, because many great researchers understand the risks involved, and they don't want what they build to be controlled solely for shareholder benefit.
While non-profits are also an option for a mission driven org, it's harder to raise the large amounts of cash that some AI startups need, and laws around deferred compensation and private inurement (e.g. options-like structures) make employee compensation harder.
>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…
Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought
Nowadays, every company—even huge ones—prefers to be seen as a "growth opportunity", so they are trying to play up their ability to create new products which will somehow be so incredible that the line keeps moving up forever.
That said, there is definitely a correlation between companies chasing new products and leaving old ones to become crap.
Founders are first. Ideas are second.
Which is: When you think about Google, true, old, "don't be evil", tech excellence Google, you don't think about Demis. You think about Jeff's and Sanjay's geeky, technically uncompromising, faces.
This means Demis wanted a change and to work on other things, it's not Google wanting this.
Edit: sibling story in front page links to this which explains better in its lede text than what I just wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/technology/google-researc...
Clayton Christensen [1] says (paraphrasing) it's a good idea to spin-off (or invest) in a startup that you've a say on, before the ecosystem sprouts a seemingly-non-entity and gently disrupts your market.
Interestingly (diff strategies i guess) Apple tends to acquire (Q.ai) rather than invest/venture (as google in OP).
[1] The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
This over-reaction is why people can't see over a long time horizon.
This is great news for Google as they realize that Sundar is the problem and he will soon leave Google for Demis to be the new CEO of Alphabet (Google) which I am predicting. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868160
Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays.
It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.
But missing out right as AI coding agents become genuinely deeply capable and useful is just an immense failure.
This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era.
Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms.
The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.
Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.
His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no?
P.S. I think his real interest is Isomorphic, and his new role will offer fewer distractions.
He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.
Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads
Something was definitely going down internally.
Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.
1) Repair search that had been broken by AI initiatives.
2) Include less invasive AI with ads for those that need to be spoon fed.
3) Pretend to work on AGI and data centers in space.
4) Sell shovels and TPUs to the gold diggers.
Where do real results live?
Don’t understand how Sundar is still running things, though.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.
These guys...
Kinsley Gaffe: A mistake whereby a politician inadvertently says something truthful which they had not meant to reveal.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe
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.
When Eric Schmidt became chairman or Ruth Porat became president, this was more a transition towards less involvement than an increase of impact.
The next chapter of our AI momentum
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755
(https://xcancel.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203)
Demis tried to be google ceo by pumping out self aggrandizing 'documentaries' and highfalutin interviews where said a whole bunch of nothing.
First, it is incredibly difficult to pivot a large organization because there are too many competing interests, too many fiefdoms people have built and too much organizational inertia. A new company has the advantage of a singularity of purpose. Google has to compete with internal interests about AI disrupting search, ad revenue and so on. This can slow you down and limit the resources you get. It's why companies get disrupted, particularly when they reach monopoly status. Steve jobs said it best [1].
Second, Gogole's path here (IMHO) is to make their own hardware. They've already done this with their TPUs but need to be able to compete with NVidia offerings. NVidia controlling the price, features and, most importantly, who gets to buy them is bad for Google. This is what Google should be pouring billions into.
The beauty of this is that success is easily measurable against metrics like price-per-petaflops, performance-per-Watt and so on. Throw money at some key Nvidia engineers and have them design silicon for you for TSMC to fab.
I still believe that Google is positioned to survive the (IMHO) inevitable AI bubble popping.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=3s
I do wonder if anybody working at Google can give us an insight why the chaos and lack of competitiveness?