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

People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.

> Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside.

Yeah he seemed too reasonable to me, relative to the fervor. Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing to catch up to the ferver that would justify their valuations and investments

Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.

Like Ive? So you mean it’s good for Google?

> It's like Apple losing Ive in a way.

Are you sure we should compare it like this? Not sure it implies what you think it does...

I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.

> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.

Uh isn’t google known to have the best tooling in the world

Maybe they are forced to use Google search.

Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.

Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system

Maybe they'll replace Hassabis with someone more focussed on beating OAI and Anthropic at chatbots? He always seemed a bit more into science, protein folding, new drugs and the like.

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.

It just depends on what are the most upvoted comments in HN. If they are bearish, you can be sure that you should be bullish in your investments. Meta was supposed to be broken as a business already, OpenAI and Anthropic would be failures as well.

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.

it's a new venture that he can then sell back to google, and continue his ongoing loop

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"

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.

Would it though? Meta and Microsoft have had very scandalous AI things happen, and their shares didn't tank (or quickly recovered)

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.

[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/05/31/google-ai-...

[2] - https://www.axios.com/2024/02/23/google-gemini-images-stereo...

I think the reason Google hasn't prioritized larger models that are more intelligent than everyone else's, even though they probably could, is because they have 4 billion active users already. For example, they send AI Overviews for a large portion of Google searches now.

So I think they have to prioritize scaling for their models to a higher degree than other groups. Being within say 5% or so in most cases is probably adequate and matters more overall for their user base than being the absolute best coder. So they may be setting compute constraints for training or inference that are firmer than other teams.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Yeah. I’m guessing they’re behind the Chinese models in capability now

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.

Everyone knows there isn't a moat.

No one joins OpenAI/Anthropic unless they think these companies will reach superintelligence.

So most people joining believe their equity will 10-100x even from where it is today.

(Coincidentally, the talent that believes we will reach AGI overlaps a lot with the best talent, which has a magnetic effect.)

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.

> 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...)

Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?

> Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments

There are PetaBytes of important scientific data locked in archival file formats. The first step is to make this efficiently readable.

https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659254

> Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available

I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better

I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.

Some do-nothing EVP probably just got control over the Gemini org

Fun fact: the Jeff Dean Facts was started by Kenton Varda (kentonv around here, also known for open-sourcing ProtoBufs v2, creating CapnProto and Sandstorm), as a joke inside Google. He has expressed regret that it eclipsed Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom Jeff Dean basically did pair-programming with.

> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE)

Uh oh...

Yes, him.

"Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points."

ahahah golden.

Will be following their journey

They are leaving Google, but Google is an investor in the new company. So a split, but not exactly a divorce. Or something.

> I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team

This is probably the only time some prominent VCs would be active during August, only for Jeff Dean & Co's company.

I can see them now frantically negotiating, responding and firing off emails right now during their holidays to get an allocation in Jeff's new company.

Would love to hear the pitch: We never had the lead in AI and now definitely lost it, despite the gazillions dollars and engineering resources of Google, but now will be different?

its a public benefit corp

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

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Ever heard of the innovator’s dilemma? Don’t underestimate the inertia of large companies and their unwillingness to pivot from their cash cow.

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).

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.

> ability to attract talent.

No, the top talent is clearly at Anthropic and OpenAI

It seems that people wanting to focus on AI-for-science instead of topping LLM benchmarks don't have a place anymore in DeepMind.

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.

What? His influence is going to be larger.

My predictions about everything ever, summarized perfectly. I need an “inverse me ETF”.

It seems Google has to play both offense and defense: competing against frontier labs' models while protecting search and ads. They also have to be mindful of not doing anything that could hurt their own search or ads. That seems harder than a frontier lab just doing offense on both models and search/ads.

Having said that, I think Google's moat is still strong with Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome, etc.

>Meanwhile, Microsoft: "Copilot!"

The difference is nobody expects anything better from Microsoft. Teams didn't exactly set the bar high.

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

Does everyone want AI?

That said though, Flash isn't it. The prices on the latest flash models put Sonnet and Terra to shame.

> 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!

Absolute download numbers are a pure vanity metric. Relative download numbers compared to other models tell you a little bit.

> And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete

Thank you for adding some clarity to this. When I calculated 900 million downloads divided by 8.3 billion people in the world, I came with a number that made it look like about one person in 10 were downloading this model.

Guess I'm not taking out a second mortgage on my house anymore to invest in $GOOG.

I actually think there's a low probability of that.

The four have so much influence within the company that they could have trivially set this up as part of Alphabet, if they wanted to. They are also ridiculously wealthy.

They are already partially funded by Google.

Both are very smart.

But Jeff was responsible for a lot more of what is actually used today than Demis.

Demis is responsible for a lot more of the hype though ;)

I think saying Jeff's contributions were a long time ago must represent some kind of lack of understanding of Jeff's recent contributions.

Jeff has still been focused more on infrastructure, and that is just more hidden most of the time.

I would say,if i was forced to pick someone whose vision to follow, it would definitely be Jeff and not Demis, even today.

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.

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.

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.

Why would they do this extra step if that were the case?

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> mobile era CEO

He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.

ty!

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.

There is no Gemini 3.5 pro despite multiple announcements?

I think he was referring to an obvious typo "publicity benefit corporation"

Google is just an investor, it's not a subsidiary.

Science fiction.

He means the chief scientist part. Before Demis had no influence on cloud, tpu development, day to day dev tools, etc.

Ah, you're right. Thanks for the correction. I read that other post too fast.

Nobel was awarded due to project management work. There are many thousands of scientists with work much much better than what Demis has done.

Tbf, he only has to get it right once.

And they did raise new funding as he predicted...Since July 2024, OpenAI has raised or secured roughly $170 billion in new capital. Numbers never see before. So yes its the one, and remarkably right so far.

As it stands, the leaked financials prove him correct. Given their losses (not counting restructuring) they are going to need enough funding to buy any of the bottom 300-400 of the F500 companies outright just to keep the lights on for the next year.

To say that’s an outrageous amount isn’t overstating in the slightest.

Given they are already being forced to drop inference prices in an attempt to compete with Chinese providers, I don’t know if billionaire investors will be willing to hand out that much money this time around if they can’t generate enough value to break even despite the hype.

But he's not just Chairman, he's taking the title of Chief Scientist. It sounds more like moving into an IC role.

It means "please, he's still here, don't let the stock plummet"

We know he's definitely stepping. That's a start.

It's just a jump to the left...

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.

hmm not really, and it probably isnt the origin, but im glad to see him vindicated by having both C-level google leadership people who targeted to try and either stop google from doing the pentagon deal, both stepping down the same day.

At least it makes me feel like he reaching out might have made a difference on remembering this people killer robots are bad, and being part of it might not be on the best of their interests to go down on history for

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...