Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

While I believe Grok was a decent model (in some of our internal use cases it performed the best until Gemini 2.5-pro came out), I can't help lament how the team chose to run.

xAI (and Twitter) was the loudest about six-hour workdays, sleeping in the office, and always shipping. ~2 years later it feels like they have nothing to show for it. I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day, with half of that being spent at the Google cafeteria and they dusted xAI years ago.

View on HN

> I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day

Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.

There’s a longstanding meme that Google is full of rest-and-vesters. Maybe it’s true in some departments, but I also have anecdotes that in GDM and other AI-related stuff, people are acutely aware of the existential threat of losing to OpenAI and have the appropriate amount of hustle.

It really doesn't feel like that and hasn't for years

No disrespect to the Google Deepmind team, but I meant it as a meme. I do not believe most Google employees work 2 hours a day.

The Google Deepminds are incredibly smart - I just find it important to point out that the xAI guys spent a year assured they would beat Google because they slept in tents that they made in the office.

Anyone Google has hired in the last ~8 years was hired onto a team that is growing and has a culture of shipping and producing. Google regularly weeds out low performers, be it new grads or long timers who started doing the rest and vest thing.

Now, I don't think most people at google are literally driving to the office or sleeping there most of the time, you'll certainly have more WLB than xAI.

I'd even say, Google is much better at calibrating the right amount to push people than some other companies.

It's almost like burning people out is a bad idea. Fair enough if you're working 12 hour days as employee 1 at a startup but when your boss has more money than God and is working you like a dog you're not going to keep that up (especially when all of those people probably have much better opportunities available to them at the drop of a hat).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com