29 comments

  • MikhailTal 2 minutes ago

    > 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

      jgalt212 a few seconds 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?

  • 650 an hour 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

      cj 3 minutes ago

      This is also how Y Combinator operates.

      Founders are first. Ideas are second.

      giwook 36 minutes 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.

      zdragnar 6 minutes 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.

      thewebguyd 35 minutes 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.

      garlic_enjoyer 30 minutes 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.

      JacobAsmuth 17 minutes ago

      So then it is similarly telling that compute is second on the list? They have more talent than compute? Layoffs incoming?

      add-sub-mul-div 43 minutes ago

      If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?

  • xnx an hour 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.

  • luisln 21 minutes 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?

  • mlmonkey 12 minutes 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.

  • VCFundedGenYer 7 minutes 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.

  • 0x70run 24 minutes ago

    miss me with the AGI nonsense

  • Mistletoe 12 minutes 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 2 minutes 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"

  • josefritzishere 12 minutes ago

    Let's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?

  • tosh an hour ago

    can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?

      colesantiago an hour 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.

        aix1 an hour 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?

        sashank_1509 an hour 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 20 minutes 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).

        junesix 30 minutes 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.

        JacobAsmuth 15 minutes ago

        > mobile era CEO

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

        lokar 33 minutes 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.

        tosh 44 minutes ago

        ty!

  • sgt101 27 minutes ago

    "Onwards!"

    These guys...

  • daun_gee 12 minutes ago

    AI is for retards.