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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

This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
To be fair, I think it's pretty hard as an AI company to secure your top worker right now unless you have a significant equity compensation. Once your name is known, and you can say you are/were "top AI researcher at OpenAI/Google/Anthropic", you can probably just make you own company and raise enough money that even if the company fails, you will probably make more off of it than what you would have at your previous place of employment.
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.
Sundar Pichai began the downfall of Google by most accounts. It went from an engineer driven culture to one of infighting, politics, and bureaucracy. It's telling when xooglers nowadays complain of maintenance and improvement of products being a career dead end vs. shipping new things. And there being so much empire building.
> And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL

As an outsider, Google seems to have a knack for minting prominence for their talent.

Maybe Google's decision to waste everyone's time and pollute the truth ecosystem by pushing half baked AI assertions into search was a mistake.
Did all these names were huge before joining Google, and Google used their extraordinary hiring skills to get them? Or a whole bunch of them had challenging problems to solve and ample resources at their disposal to become huge?

To me it is good thing in either case. Extraordinary people are leaving to make even faster research and development. A lot of talent in Google hitherto unnamed is going to get chance to shine.

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.

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.
> 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.

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.
New Jeff Dean fact: when Jeff leaves Google, the stock drops 20 points.
https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724

> Announcing Discovery Loop!

> I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.

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.

Just some random tidbit: When I was in high school I bought every computer gaming magazine I could get my hands on and could afford with my allowance.

So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.

Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]

I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.

It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

"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.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe

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?

Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.

There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".

I found this article more thorough:

https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...

What happened to the "strike team" that Sergey Brin was leading to try and improve Gemini's coding performance?
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

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.
gemma-4 is an incredibly good model, beating several others five time its' size. Hope Jeff's departure won't impact their next-gen products! And best of success for their new ventures!
With the top AI personnel leaving Google, I wonder what will happen to their Gemini. Right now they still have a lead in inference hardware with TPUs but with both Anthropic and OpenAI developing their own chips, I wonder how long until either one will catch up.
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?
Google investing in Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat is a good result for Google. Means they are less likely to go to the competition and easier to bring them back into the fold if they do something next level.
Does anyone else feel something’s off about sundar?

I feel google has become evil.

I had my phone and laptop stolen and did not have 2fa on but Google still locked me out.

That’s stupid.

I wonder if this has anything to do with it

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

WoW, so basically all senior members of GDM are now mostly gone? I thought Google was lagging in coding AI, but this suggests bigger issues.

I am not fan of the future of AI but this I am not sure how I feel about Google's (also Amazon recently laid off it's AGI team) AI initiatives blowing up before all the new AI Labs.

I don't get why Google failed here? maybe after a decade someone will write about it candidly.

End of an era for Alphabet.
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.

Wow we just had a post on here a couple weeks ago about Jeff Dean supporting dissident voices at Google.
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?
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.
Demis stepped down? Who cares? Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google. We are in uncharted territory.
> 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

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.

Google’s trajectory unfortunately starts to feel similar to when yahoo lost everything in the early dotcom bubble except it owned a huge chunk of Alibaba. Google’s internal decision to stop publishing useful research probably started the slow but sure process of internal decline. I still hope they can recover, given their amazing position in terms of data and infrastructure, but it no longer feels like an obvious or easy task, when only 6 or 7 years ago they felt untouchable.
From https://www.ft.com/content/61d41764-f2f7-4906-a112-ff3073972...

> The moves suggest that DeepMind will be absorbed into Google’s broader business. [...] > They added that while Google DeepMind would not become purely commercial, it was integrating further into Google’s business.

I guess might be quite a change (but writing was on the wall, the Deepmind -> Google Deepmind part was the first step)

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.

Google's stock dropped 5% right away, 200billion of value
It’s so heartwarming to see the two pals, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, continue together! Many years back there was an article about how the two created the modern web.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

I would have thought Jeff Dean would never ever leave Google. What on earth is going on?
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?
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

Between Shazeer and these guys

Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads