The next chapter of our AI momentum

(blog.google)

51 points | by colesantiago 1 hour ago

15 comments

  • MikhailTal 9 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

    • giancarlostoro 4 minutes 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?

      • kokanee 2 minutes ago
        Does everyone want AI?
    • jgalt212 7 minutes 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 58 minutes 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 42 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.
    • thewebguyd 41 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.
    • zdragnar 12 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.
    • cj 10 minutes ago
      This is also how Y Combinator operates.

      Founders are first. Ideas are second.

    • garlic_enjoyer 37 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 23 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 49 minutes ago
      If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?
  • xnx 1 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.

    • forrestthewoods 2 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?
    • Analemma_ 6 minutes 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?
  • luisln 28 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 19 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 13 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.
  • dude250711 6 minutes ago
    The momentum is not being conserved here.
  • 0x70run 30 minutes ago
    miss me with the AGI nonsense
  • Mistletoe 18 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 9 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 18 minutes ago
    Let's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?
  • tosh 1 hour ago
    can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
    • colesantiago 1 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 52 minutes 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?

      • junesix 37 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.
      • sashank_1509 59 minutes 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 26 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).
      • lokar 40 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.

      • JacobAsmuth 21 minutes ago
        > mobile era CEO

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

      • tosh 50 minutes ago
        ty!
  • sgt101 33 minutes ago
    "Onwards!"

    These guys...

  • daun_gee 18 minutes ago
    AI is for retards.
  • krembo 13 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • conartist6 43 minutes ago
    [flagged]