Comment by xnx
10 hours 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.
> Sanjay (who just joined Twitter)
Clarification: this comment is saying Sanjay Ghemawat joined Twitter as a user recently (new account @Sanjay_Ghemawat as of July 2026), as opposed to Sanjay working for Twitter the company.
Such bad wording wow.
I mean in the previous paragraph it says they’re creating a company. And is Twitter even hiring anymore?
> It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
It think the vast majority is what the decision to leave says about the overall sentiment at Google, not the value of these two individuals.
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?
I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it.
Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their position Apple, they do have a model, so they're not totally beholden to another for AI (like Apple is using Gemini!).
But beyond that, for training the model they have YouTube, and of course they have their crawler and index, and the billions of users.
I think HN skews coding agent focused, but that's not really a market for Google. I expect we will have coding specific models in the future, but Google wants a more general intelligence, to handle search queries, be able to connect email to chat to calendar and tasks, and so on. I don't find Gemini that much worse than the other big models for non-coding things.
I read Google's business incentive as "in it to not lose". AI is a new consumer endpoint and Google currently captures a lot of the endpoints.
> I think HN skews coding agent focused
100% this. Coding agents are an interesting test ground, but the people who care about them are a fairly small bubble.
I think they carry some of the overall AI weight because of the "what if you can vibe code your entire business" moonshot, but that's still orders of magnitude away and who knows if today's coding agents will actually be a stepping stone to that. If we ever get there it will likely be with entirely new domain languages.
Agreed:)
Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system
Are any of those advantages getting stronger over time? I guess TPUs but Google is selling several gigawatts to Anthropic
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Crawler and Google Scholar and Google Books.
> Data centers, TPUs
Those 2 are definitely NOT Google's strong points. Maybe by means of marketing.
Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Equinix and many more are in the data center race.
As for TPUs... Broadcom, Mediatek and all the other partners you hear less about are likely more important. Google just has the flashy media outreach.
As much as everyone wants to pay accomplished celebrities, all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves. A guard passing torch can be opportunity.
Now, whether Google is the right environment to nurture, that’s its own quandary.
>all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves
They all leave to start new companies. Everyone on the Attention is all you need paper is at a startup.
It just depends on what are the most upvoted comments in HN. If they are bearish, you can be sure that you should be bullish in your investments. Meta was supposed to be broken as a business already, OpenAI and Anthropic would be failures as well.
I keep hearing this, but Hassabis did not leave Google/Alphabet. He merely changed from an administrative position to a more technical one.
Maybe they'll replace Hassabis with someone more focussed on beating OAI and Anthropic at chatbots? He always seemed a bit more into science, protein folding, new drugs and the like.
Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler.
Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other.
A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.
Google's weakness (well one of) is its total lack of cohesion. If the Google Books team could, they would sell access to that data in a heartbeat to boost their metrics.
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you mean x, right? just to fully understand
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?
it's a new venture that he can then sell back to google, and continue his ongoing loop