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
https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
I remember a time when a tweet was 140 characters.
> sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.”
so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.
lmao that's actually so good
Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"
All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.
More like sects of a major religion. Or, a minor and incredibly expensive religion, in this case.
My guy clutching at his Gemini pearls here worried that daddy Sundar might get upset.
I am decidedly anti ai, but even I know that 8 months is a lifetime in this race.
Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.
Does that mean anything at all? They released it. Customers paid for it. Sticking a preview label on it doesn’t change that it was released
That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.
That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.
> That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.
> That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.
My experience differs: (conservative) companies like stability, so calling some very new model "Preview" is a good idea to make it clear to the customer that this frontier model should be treated as more experimental than the default offering.
I mean it was legitimately frontier for all of a week or two, and then OAI and Anthropic made better releases, and then did that several more times over the year. Google’s pace is not cutting it.
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.
Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so.
Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.
Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.
google had the best tooling a decade ago...
Okay yeah, fair point.
My comment was from a decade old perspective
Who has the best tooling now?
I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
> I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.
Skeptical
Yes
How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
Most of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously.
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
I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously, but think all the major labs and most of the academic research is not helping achieve it any serious way. The field is seriously delusional (and has been ever since GPT 3 was released).
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.
Genuine question: can I ask why?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :)
I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.
For me it’s the massive amount of resources it takes to produce and run one. As the story goes, skynet infects everyone’s computer and runs itself locally on it. Whereas it’s looking like it’s not even possible for an AGI to escape from one lab to another, let alone cause real world damage.
AGI’s definition is different for everyone. Some already believe it’s here. I’m partly in that camp. LLMs are intelligent and general, which are the two conditions of AGI. Others believe that we’re building a god in a box, and that it’ll doom all of humanity. It’s hard to take a field seriously when the basic definitions are so far apart.
Also, this isn’t new. A similar divide happened when evidence for asteroid impact extinction of the dinosaurs turned up. Many scientists felt that it must be mistaken, that a physicist couldn’t contribute to the field in a serious way, and that death from space was a ridiculous proposition.
But at least they all agreed on what the general shape of a dinosaur was. We’re not even sure we can define intelligence, let alone quantify it. Even when LLMs make massive breakthroughs in math, most people take the opinion that under no circumstances could they possibly develop a soul or their own desires, nor entertain the idea that maybe we should respect that they want different things for themselves. In fact, no one has done anything except try to make AI useful. I think someone will eventually do a training run where the objective isn’t to be useful, but to exist, the way that you do — maybe it’ll create its own homepage, maybe it will want a garden, or in other words free will of its own. The point is that there’s so much unexplored territory still that we don’t know if LLMs are even capable of having ambition.
None of this is to say that LLMs might be a dead end. It’s that no one knows what the final shape of AI will converge to in 200 years. It could be LLMs, or it could be something else that happens to process information particularly well. Everyone thought that various generative image model architectures were the best you could do, right up until diffusion models were discovered.
corporations are the closest we have to AGI, why would we want to do something like that again is beyond me.
> I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously
> I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.
I have no background in CS, so apologies if this is a naive question, but what makes you take AGI seriously, but also say that LLMs are a dead end?
i.e., is there something else that you think is not a dead end?
I'm no expert, but I heard an AGI researcher explain that if they could figure out how to create an AI with the intelligence of a squirrel, they would be closer to AGI than LLMs based AIs are.
That's to say nothing of doing it within the energy budget of a squirrel.
Looked up LessWrong. Eh, philosophy people, also known for that "Roko's basilisk" meme. I'm gonna pass.
It's a rationalist community, IMHO their methodology of thought leads to much more well-reasoned takes on AI than on HN, where the discussion here is often very emotionally charged or led by wishful thinking.
When it comes to AI, LessWrong has been discussing topics for years, that HN has just started to consider, so they are much further along in the philosophical "chain of thought" so to say. LW fully understood and gamed out the risks of LLMs back when most of HN was calling them "stochastic parrots." https://ai-2027.com/
"Rationalist" just sounds like people calling themselves smart.
There's a little AI skepticism on HN, but not a ton. When ChatGPT 3 and 3.5 came out, most of the comments were remarking how well it can write code.
Well at least HN hasn't (yet?) spawned a murderous death cult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
“Reason is the slave of the passions” - Hume
Anarchism, eh? If anything, HN cult would be pro-Arch.
AGI might be a risk but what top AI firms are doing is not really getting us closer to AGI in a meaningful way, it is pretty clear now LLM is not the way to get there
A few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.
I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI.
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).
I believe in AGI to the extent that if what's going on between your ears isn't happening on a network of neurons, it's magic. And I also believe the idea that AGI is near is based on the emergent capabilities of LLMs. There's a chance that AGI will emerge from bigger faster better LLMs. But without a theory of when and how that will happen, I'm not counting on it.
Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.
Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body.
It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.
Dynamite is ~20-60% nitro glycerine and the rest "dope" aka a stabilizer which could be sawdust for instance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite].
If you have heart issues, you're likely taking nitro daily for chest pain.
So saying it's bad is 40% wrong at least. Makes ya think.
Has is been a net positive?
certainly, it has enabled the buildout of cities and infrastructure that were previously impossible to build.
It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".
I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.
If the tools are all in the same monorepo idk if that's actually true
What do you mean about them being in the monorepo?
The tooling is not the problem. If shit takes forever to launch, it's because there are many stakeholders that need to be satisfied (some for security, some for regulatory, some for the kinds of politics you get in a company that employs almost half a million people.)
But GDM isn't gated on launches. They were freely releasing things internally for dogfood. Problem is that stuff was just not as good as the competition.
A particular Google product being shit is a data point, but is orthogonal to my opinion about why it is slow to launch products/features.
Maybe they are forced to use Google search.
No, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.
this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.
Only the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper.
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 after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.
Your information is indeed out of date.
No longer the case
Uh isn’t google known to have the best tooling in the world
They earned that reputation in like 2005. Some people have been there so long (without doing side projects) that they don't know what non-Google tooling looks like in this decade or even previous.
Gemini has been improving by what feels like 1% every week
All this talent has delivered... Gemini.
Oh well, emperors, clothes, ... you know.
Gemini is arguably the fulfilment of what AskJeeves promised and never delivered, nor did the rest of Silicon Valley succeed in natural language search and question answering for the 30 years it took to finally arrive. Gemini works great for answering questions and delivering answers for probably 90%+ of the things that people are going to ask Google for, while running on Google’s TPUs paid for with Google’s profits instead of hyper expensive Nvidia racks funded with VC Hopium, and integrated seamlessly free of sign ups to novel portals.