> “I haven't heard that myself,” Hassabis says after I bring up the CEO talk. He instantly points to how busy he is with research, how much invention is just ahead, and how much he wants to be part of it. Perhaps, given the stakes, that’s right where Google needs him. “I can do management,” he says, ”but it's not my passion. Put it that way. I always try to optimize for the research and the science.”
Sundar makes ~200M as the CEO of Google whereas DeepMind sold for ~400-650M. There's plenty of monetary incentive to take the job, not to mention more power to set the company direction through resource allocation. And it's clear that there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. Maybe Hassabis is a contender because he's been getting some pretty serious press since the beginning of the year (which is when the Sundar article grumblings started).
You don't need a PR campaign to oust Sundar. I think 7 out of 10 Googlers would agree that Sundar is uninspiring and has allowed the erosion of most of what was good about Google's culture.
I left partially because I hated the feeling that "this year will be average - meaning worse than last year but better than next year". Slow downward drift, culture erosion, lack of leadership, lack of clarity, etc.
Management isn't leadership, and Sundar is more of a manager than a leader.
My impression from the outside is indeed that the man is a problem. And part of the problem is that the problem is allowed to continue to exist by the Alphabet board. Which means the real problem is over there. They are just looking at the stock price, which is of course fine. Until it isn't. I think the whole point of Sundar always was that he's very obviously not a leader. He's a care taker.
I used to work in a big multi national (Nokia) with a care taker CEO (Olli Pekka Kallasvuo) who took over from the man that grew Nokia from a large but insignificant Finnish company to the smart phone behemoth it was around 2005 (Jorma Ollila). Kallasvuo presided over the emergence of the Apple's iphone and Google's Android as the two new competitors that ultimately killed it off. And did nothing whatsoever about it. The man was a bean counter whose job it was to protect the stock price.
By the time the Nokia board (under leadership of the former CEO, Ollila) appointed a new CEO (Stephen Elop, an MS executive) with the clear intention to orchestrate some collaboration with and the eventual takeover by MS, it was already too late. Nokia flailed for a few years and MS eventually pulled the plug a year after acquiring what remained of the phone business unit for next to nothing. By then the stock price had tanked, market share was in the gutter, and the value was gone. Everything the board thought they knew about smart phones was no longer relevant. Ollila got removed from the board in the aftermath.
People blame CEOs, but it's the boards of these companies that appoint these CEOs, protect them, and decline to fire them when they fail. That's where the problems are. Nothing changes until you fix the boards. It's always fixable with the right people and leadership. Just look at MS post Ballmer. In Alphabet's case, the two founders are on the board and they are the ones that put Sundar in their place. Maybe it's time for them to move on? Of course the issue is that they have a lot of shares (class B) in Alphabet. Institutional investors have about 35% of the class A shares and the rest is publicly traded. So, nothing happens until the stock nosedives. By which time it might be too late.
of course, but boards are largely impotent. they are too far from the action, don't want to rock the boat even more when things are not going great, and of course management easily bamboozles them with some fancy plan ...
but in the end there's nothing they can do, except fire the management. but it requires risk taking, and it's a collective action problem ...
so if there's a majority shareholder, maybe.. but usually they are the CEO anyway (or appointed it)
Yeah if I wasn't planning on a big career shift anyway in the next 2-3 years, I'd be out the door at Google. Pay is great, I'm able to be fully remote, and it isn't too stressful to do my day job - but the company feels nothing like it did 10 years ago.
You know how there are top down and bottom up companies? My experience at Google now is that it is neither. VPs expect bottom up work and then smash it down whenever they don't like it - but they also cannot articulate what they actually want. I'm constantly being asked to go through prioritization processes that take a ton of time and end with "eh, every project stays at the funding level it is already at."
It doesn’t matter if they do. Larry and Sergei have 51.2% control through their class B shares which basically only they can hold and give them 10x votes of class A shares (i.e. RSUs).
They still have to be mindful of perception of their employees with how they wield that control, but yes basically they can technically tell the board or any shareholders to go pound sand.
2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute and access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI on both counts.
3. New models are released on a weekly basis by all sorts of companies. So OpenAI has no monopoly on LLM models. In fact their competition is staggering (NVIDIA, Meta, Google, DataBricks, Amazon (numerous other startups)) It will not be long before there are even more.
It seems to me that Altman saw this all as a timing thing. Reveal your cards now and force others to do the same in the hopes of obtaining a strategic position over competitors. Googles cashflow seems to be doing just fine and I haven't had to fight off any urges to use Bing.
You’re missing the final point - the use case beyond Chat. Google has search, GMail, Android, Docs, Developer Tools, etc
Google can put an LLM into everything and sell it. Not just a chatbot. OpenAI can sell theirs to consumers as a chat bot or an API. Google can out monetize them handily.
The best thing Google can do (which it’s starting to do) is open up access to LLMs. And help everyone else do the same. Give it away and flood the internet with more LLaMAs, more Groks, more CLIPs, more Hermes, more Mistal, more SIGLIPS, etc. If they just drown out the competition, and turn good enough” models into a true commodity, they’ll dethrone OpenAI easily.
Also no one mentions YouTube. Surely that data is a massive untapped opportunity. We saw the multi-modal abilities of Gemini today. A few years from now, and some better GPUs, and it might be able to handle video in real-time.
No. The best model wins. I’m currently paying $20/mo for all three leading models (GPT4, Opus, and Ultra). But in the future, when GPT5/Opus2/Ultra1.5 come out, I expect the prices to go up. So I will be choosing the best one. Whatever is on the top of the leaderboard will get my $200/mo (maybe even $2k/mo if it’s really smart).
This is forward looking. Models need to keep getting better. That takes research, and compute, and data. It’s not free, and it’s getting increasingly expensive.
I too pay for multiple services (Gemini, Claude, CodePilot). Not everyone can or will pay $2k, or $200, or even $20 for a massive model. And most flagship models today are significantly better than models 6mo ago, which were already transformative and valuable on their own. There is a huge opportunity to market “good enough” models for tasks that don’t require the latest and greatest abilities (eg summarize this list, write an email). Arguably, we already have much smaller and simpler models for a lot of these tasks.
There is a market for $20/mo assistants, but the potential market for “everything else” is much bigger - and assistants will be moving towards running locally where possible. These companies are burning billions, they’re going to need a bigger revenue prize for investors. And that’s integration of LLMs and AI into every other software product. The less of those products that run with OpenAI models, the less income OpenAI has to compete, and the harder it will be to keep up. That’s why the opportunity exists for big tech companies can flood the market with good but smaller models and ruin opportunities for cash flow to build the better models.
If the next gen of the top models improves as much as I hope they will - we will not need any integration. It will be similar to hiring a human personal assistant. But much cheaper, even at $2k/mo. Even if this doesn’t happen with GPT5, it can very well happen with GPT6 a year later.
> 2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute and access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI on both counts.
If a smaller company with less compute and data commercializes something before Google which has more compute and data, doesn't that mean they are behind? You don't measure a car race by fuel available in the pit and faster top speed. You measure by who gets to the finish first. It just goes to show that Google has a horrible driver.
I guess the point is this is a very long race and, actually, the end is still quite far away (if that end is AGI).
In his Lex Friedman interview Altman asks ‘what has ChatGPT really fundamentally changed about the world?’ - basically making the point that they’re still just getting started.
Having a tonne of compute and cash is still going to be really important in this race. You have to make it to the finish line to win.
Part of the point I was trying to make is that there is less benefit to Google to tout their advances - most of this are trade secrets. I could see them using it to enhance their current offerings in subtle ways.
Now that the cat is out of the bag that will likely change. Just because OpenAI publicly released a produce doesn't mean Google has not developed their own. It doesn't mean they have either.
These models still have a long way to go before they can advise Kirk on running the Enterprise:)
While everyone is hyper-focused on LLMs, Google is able to do more than that and imagine what Google DeepMind has not announced yet.
> It seems to me that Altman saw this all as a timing thing. Reveal your cards now and force others to do the same in the hopes of obtaining a strategic position over competitors. Googles cashflow seems to be doing just fine and I haven't had to fight off any urges to use Bing.
LLMs are something that is already played out to the first movers. Google has already caught up and the moat and monopoly has been evaporated.
At some point is more money really important? My impression from meeting Demis like a decade ago is that he is an actual good person. Being a CEO of a top corporation does not seem like a good life move for someone who cares about others. There are myriad examples of how much engineers who become managers-only find it insufferable. If you're excited about thinking about the technical problems of AGI, is simply more money (or even more power) going to matter?
It is very hard for me to imagine an engineer who has FU money picking a CEO position that pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year over an innovative, R&D type position that likely pays tens of millions of dollars a year.
You don’t need to pay money on things like this. You leverage your contacts to create profiles like this article. The newspaper gets access and you get your profile elevated. And it wouldn’t be google the company doing this but players within the company / influential and powerful shareholders etc.
Google has been failing continuously in user experience under his leadership:
1. Search has become an ad-riddled, clickbait SEO infested mess
2. All those naming kerfuffles (how's Allo and GSuite doing?)
3. Cloud still significantly behind AWS and Azure
4. AI stuff behind at least OpenAI and Anthropic. Applied ML stuff well behind specialized startups.
5. Pixel still not selling very well. Android still feeling like it's trying to catch up to Apple, still fragmented.
6. Layoffs everyone believed wouldn't happen until the very last second they were announced.
7. Customer support story, including toward large cloud customers, still abysmal.
Etc etc.
Yes, ad revenue increased and with it the share price, but ad revenue comes from having had a good product 5 years ago. To sustain it you need good products and good engineers to build them.
Google is trending downward. It needs a fresh CEO.
Sundar makes ~200M as the CEO of Google whereas DeepMind sold for ~400-650M. There's plenty of monetary incentive to take the job, not to mention more power to set the company direction through resource allocation. And it's clear that there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. Maybe Hassabis is a contender because he's been getting some pretty serious press since the beginning of the year (which is when the Sundar article grumblings started).