Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down

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.

No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar.

If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?

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

its a public benefit corp

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?

> 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

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"

Google AI was telling people to put elmer's glue on pizza to help the cheese stick, turning the Founding Fathers black, and more. Oh and the Google AI 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 only effect of this was lots of amusing posts and articles. Their stock price went up during the whole ordeal.

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.

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?

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"

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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