The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...
But missing out right as AI coding agents become genuinely deeply capable and useful is just an immense failure.
Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads
Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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
People who truly care about becoming rich*
DeepMind made enormous transformative discoveries, for instance in the world of protein folding. But that will just save human lives, not let CEOs fire their people to grab a larger piece of cake for themselves.
It's funny, because I think the company that's going to be best positioned coming out of this bubble is in fact google, because they have the expertise and the capital. But I honestly can't tell you right now what their AI product even is -- I've seen so many things go into the graveyard a few months after its launched that I'm utterly confused what their offering even is at this point.
Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been playing by this playbook of focusing on scale and training data, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic have done so well because they are likely doing much more interesting things to improve their models over time. It makes sense when you realize that one of Google's key strengths, besides talent, is that they have an incredible amount of data they can use for training due to being both the world's leading search engine as well as having all that video data from YouTube. Scaling the training data makes more sense to them than it does to Anthropic and OpenAI, who are both relatively data-disadvantaged.
You can kind of see this when you look at the Gemini 3 scorecard when it came out (https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/g...) and notice that while it wasn't as good as Claude And GPT at coding, it scored higher on a bunch of other non-coding benchmarks, and I think the reason why is simply because of Google's data advantage.
If true, I feel even more vindicated for believing that the "scale is all we need" narrative was bullshit.
They getting a higher ROI renting their TPUs to Anthropic et al instead of performing training and serving their own models. Google cloud has insane backlog, and has rapidly expanded to satisfy it. While those DCs get built, they’re cannibalizing their own products for it.
This makes sense because (1) they are investors in Anthropic, so they still win and (2) they can always catch up on model training later when the profit opportunity shifts, or abandon it if there is no way to recapture that value.
It's a huge company.
It's unlikely there is any one person to blame (and entirely possible he has none of it). But things need to change.
Founders are first. Ideas are second.
Edit: hmm, no, they seem to be mentioning AGI and frontier models in https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...
And most likely this is a calculated step to avoid freaking people out, even though he is effectively leaving.
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.
This over-reaction is why people can't see over a long time horizon.
This is great news for Google as they realize that Sundar is the problem and he will soon leave Google for Demis to be the new CEO of Alphabet (Google) which I am predicting. [0]
I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team
It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier.
Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche.
From day one everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market, but it looks more remote than ever. Maybe Hassabis' personal inclination towards AI-for-science, and physics/chemistry in particular -- as opposed to consumer AI and coding AI -- has hurt them commercially.
> 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)
Some think Gemini is falling behind in benchmarks so there was a shakeup at the top. I don’t agree with it.
That said, winning this LLM race is difficult given the number of talented people working on it across the world.
> ... independent publicity [sic] benefit corporation in which Google ...
A Freudian slip? https://archive.is/SxFjr.
Clayton Christensen [1] says (paraphrasing) it's a good idea to spin-off (or invest) in a startup that you've a say on, before the ecosystem sprouts a seemingly-non-entity and gently disrupts your market.
Interestingly (diff strategies i guess) Apple tends to acquire (Q.ai) rather than invest/venture (as google in OP).
[1] The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
Very few companies have leadership that can prevent this infighting and force teams on directed goals.
Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.
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?
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.
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...)
He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.
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".
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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?
What's happening?!
Have they had enough of Google?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...
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 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.
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.
Something was definitely going down internally.
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.
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.
ahahah golden.
Will be following their journey
- 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.
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.
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 need to route all browser search strings to an LLM, and slowly begin to charge where people will pay. Likely ad space.
No, the top talent is clearly at Anthropic and OpenAI
He won’t have any authority in the company other than leading and voting in board meetings.
Right now AI companies are competing to make LLMs better at graduate-school level tasks. They all can already competently tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or when the first Led Zeppelin album was released.
Google has multiple cash firehouses, the small AI companies do not.
Google buys Anthropic for cheap? How?
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?
Uh oh...
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
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.
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.
Heard this multiple time, to me this is pure history rewriting and post-rationalization. OpenAI also had a internal chat app before chatgpt, Microsoft had multiple, a bunch of other players also had internal chatgpt equivalents + many startups built some using OAI API.
The breakthrough of ChatGPT wasnt because OAI were the first to think of that (absolutely obvious and basic) product, it was because they were the first to get a model strong enough to be actually useful to talk to, vs a mere fun novelty.
There is no evidence whatsoever that DM ever had such a model that they decide not to talk about/release.
At some point we have to all accept that powerful AI is most likely dangerous AI as well, almost by definition.
Editor’s note: Today, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shared some changes with Google DeepMind teams, including new roles for Demis Hassabis and Koray Kavukcuoglu. Below are the messages Sundar and Demis sent to employees.
We’ve made extraordinary progress to deliver on our full AI stack. We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company. And you saw the incredible momentum at earnings across all our businesses, including Search, YouTube, and Cloud. Our Gemini models are in high demand among developers and businesses, and the Gemini app reached 950M+ monthly users. Meanwhile, our AI research continues to drive field-defining breakthroughs (like last week’s Gemini Robotics advances).
We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier. At the same time, there’s never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science. Today Demis, Koray and I are sharing a few changes to our Google DeepMind teams that will enable us to do both.
AGI and science: Demis has described us as standing in the foothills of the singularity, and has been spending a lot of his time engaging externally. He and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI. It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it. So, moving forward, Demis will become the Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. He’ll remain closely connected to Koray, Josh, and our GDM teams, advising across models and research. I’m so excited for Demis — this is truly his life’s work and purpose. You can read Demis’s note to GDM below.
Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads. We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve. I’m really excited for our upcoming model releases and the progress we’re seeing. We have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here. Koray, the current Chief Technology Officer of GDM and our Chief AI Architect, will step up as SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting to me. He will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Koray has been at DeepMind since its early days, and over his 13 years there, he has started our deep learning team and led the way on breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN. I look forward to seeing him lead GDM into this next chapter.
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. Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era. On a personal note, it’s been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay, and I wish them all the best! We’ll continue to work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances.
We are at a dynamic moment with so much opportunity ahead. With today's changes we're going to keep driving our momentum. Onwards!
-Sundar
Hi Team
We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.
With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability. I will be taking on a new strategic role as Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and I’m excited to announce that Koray will be stepping up to lead GDM as SVP of Google DeepMind, in addition to his role as Chief AI Architect of Google.
Koray and I have been working together for over 13 years, since the early days of DeepMind. He is one of the world's foremost AI experts and has been championing GDM's mission from day one. I have total confidence in Koray, Josh, and the rest of the GDM exec team as they continue to spearhead the latest AI developments across Google. The Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while, and I'm excited about the great progress we’re making with our new models including Gemini 4.
In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters, and to advise Koray, Josh, and the GDM leads, from our awesome new London Platform 37 offices. As part of this transition, I’ll also be leaning into my role at Isomorphic, where we are making extremely rapid and promising progress, to accelerate our mission there even faster. As you've heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.
We’ve built a unique culture at GDM that has served us very well. I want to thank each and every one of you for your brilliance, dedication, and effort that make GDM the huge success it is today. We should all be extremely proud of the amazing things we’ve achieved so far. We’ve become the AI engine room of Google, with Gemini delivering helpful experiences everywhere including AI Mode and AI Overviews, the Gemini App rocketing to over 950M monthly users, and our fundamental and scientific research continues to lead the world. I’m very excited for our next chapter and the best is yet to come!
As a business we are in an incredibly strong position. We are the only company that has the full stack and we’re world-class at every layer from infrastructure to cloud to frontier models to AI-first applications. We have all the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will.
Best
Demis
"Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI."
-July 29, 2024
They may not capture enterprise use, but I don't think they have to. That's only one piece of the market. AI that's useful to consumers will still get delivered via a smartphone, and Google is in a great place to capture that.
I also don't think LLMs have to be a "winner takes all" situation. Value isn't going to come from having direct access to a chatbot or selling API inference, value is going to be in the form of a specific product (for most, devs aside here). Something a consumer, or a non-tech business can buy off the shelf and plug and play. A "ready made" customer service agent system, a "ready made" BI platform using AI, etc.
For consumers, that's probably going to look like whatever is bundled and tightly integrated into their mobile OS of choice.
The group running the company, is the company.
This is in addition to bumping their CapEx spend to the extent their cash flow turned negative for the first time ever this quarter: https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-had-its-f...
The world doesn’t realize how desperately compute-crunched hyperscalers are to meet AI demand.
This is a better problem to have than SpaceX, which is renting out capacity obviously because it’s own AI products aren’t selling.
Yeah, this is one of the things I find so weird on the discourse. If you get there negligeably later, but without astonishing spend and waste, you might even be better off in the long term.
They are quietly trying to become the chatbot that everyone uses to look things up. That strikes me as an intelligent move - not everything has to be done by an expensive frontier model.
Everyone else was scared to unleashed it on the general public because it was too powerful with too many unknowns (in ~2022, hindsight is different)
Altman didn't give a fuck, first mover was more important to him.
In most cases, it doesn't really matter. The board + management is still in charge, and they have significant legal leeway regardless of the structure. But there's little additional cost to opt for a PBC, and it does give you more legal defensibility to be truly mission driven. Standard C Corps weren't really intended for mission driven companies (see the shareholder primacy norm).
I think it's popular for AI startups, because many great researchers understand the risks involved, and they don't want what they build to be controlled solely for shareholder benefit.
While non-profits are also an option for a mission driven org, it's harder to raise the large amounts of cash that some AI startups need, and laws around deferred compensation and private inurement (e.g. options-like structures) make employee compensation harder.
There is another universe where Google is hard AGI forward, freeing up as much compute as possible for Deepmind, turning away OAI and Anthropic, and offering the uncontested premier AI research lab, by probably an order of magnitude or more compute. Gemini 3.5 ultra is limited availability with unreal abilities.
But their balance sheet becomes terrifying, and it's all or nothing that this plays, er pays, out.
Right now though Google is pretty well hedged. Even Chinese models likely just mean more compute sold.
Instant nostalgia: https://youtu.be/tQJJ_rhHxIk?si=V8pOVwj3gYkw0xKB&t=188
But more seriously, this has to do with DeepMind falling way behind the frontier in intelligence and cost per task. There's basically no reason to use a Gemini model today.
Whether this happened because they bet on "world models -> better reasoning" and that bet didn't pay off, or failed a frontier run for technical reasons like OpenAI did with 4.5, or something else went down? We don't know.
Will they bleed talent, fall further behind until they give up, or clean the organizational and infrastructural cobwebs and get back in the saddle? We don't know.
2024: Google is on fire. Sergey coming back helped. Gemini, Veo. They've caught up. OpenAI is doomed.
2025: Google is seriously winning now. Nano Banana!! Google was destined to be the true winner of AI.
2026 H1: Google is slow as hell. Where is Gemini? Google is not launching anything, meanwhile just look at everyone else. Anthropic! And open source. What the hell are they doing over there?
2026 H2: Everyone is leaving Google. Google is doomed. PMs are destroying the company. They don't take risks.
Meanwhile, Microsoft: "Copilot!"
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?
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?
Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.
To its credit Google seems willing to disrupt itself before its competitors can.
model training and inference is the opposite. people switch LLMs like people change clothes in the morning. there are popular services (openrouter) that make moving as easy as changing a model string.
I think the question is whether that's even relevant.
If AI becomes a commodity (will it?) you're better off being Google than OpenAI.
Microsoft struggled to keep up with the mobile industry frontier and here they are, healthier than ever.
this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.
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.
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.
The difference is nobody expects anything better from Microsoft. Teams didn't exactly set the bar high.
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!
Having said that, I think Google's moat is still strong with Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome, etc.
That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.
Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed in the past few months, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. If it even knows what boq is, it's because it did a moma search on the fly.
So is IBM.
There was a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back about how IBM is flying under the radar, and doing well by not taking the hype bait.
It noted that 70% of all credit card transactions on the planet go through an IBM system.
Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).
Cloud and gmail, I agree.
I don't think YouTube can survive if GenAI keeps going like this. Android, same, but on a different timescale and for different reasons. The Play Store (and all other app stores including Apple's) will also face problems from GenAI making apps (it already replaces my need to buy, but I'm weird and a software dev ("but I repeat myself")).
Not sure how big a moat Chrome really is? It's more like a sales funnel than a product itself, I think?
Because real Fable usage starts at $20/month, and has oppressive usage limits even at that (ridiculous) monthly price.
Compared to my $3/month GLM-5.2 subscription, I have never felt like I was leaving capabilities on the table by refusing to cough up $20 for 15 minutes of Fable use per day.
But people want what AI does for them. It's a tragedy of the commons situation.
A model serves a different purpose from a web crawler.
I'd prefer to be able to find source material over steering a model I have no control over while managing hallucinated outputs without the ability to fact check.
Just because it sourced some materials using RAG doesn't make its outputs valid, accurate, or factual.
Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue.
They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari.
If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals.
So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.
Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.
I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework
You can solve it for cheaper if you use GLM but if you are involved in it more, but that defeats the purpose.
Check out the New Luddite movement [1] [2]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/08/business/ai-luddite-movement-...
Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.
I personally like google over asking an AI. Esp. since something like google is a substrate without which an AI would be far more prone to hallucinations.
Single prompting a very complex tasks is rare even on frontier models, because it can be done successfully only for specific situations (e.g. you have a very strong verification step the model can iterate on).
Most of my everyday usage is for smaller takes, were you don't really get the benefit of the most expensive models, and my guess is that is the case for the most users
“Put the data in the model bro”
Strong disagree on this. Any decently complicated task like a refactor is going to be more likely to be solved by Fable than by Gemma 3B or whatever.
I have personally tried to use Sonnet over Opus for tasks and Sonnet gets things right sometimes and at other times I wish I had just paid higher.
This is the standard pattern I keep seeing and I can have a bet with you that it would stay like this.
I'm talking about API prices - subscription is a different game.