With Google's frontier AI models again reported to have fallen behind their competitors, as evidenced by the recurring launch delays for Gemini 3.5 Pro, which has supposedly fallen short of Google's internal goals, there were increasing rumblings of a widespread upheaval over at Google.
Now, just a few days after Google released the Gemini 3.6 Flash to middling reviews, the architect of Google's AI strategy over the past 15 years or so, Jeff Dean, is leaving to build an AGI-focused enterprise, while the incumbent CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, is stepping down from his apex role.
Google has just published a blog , disclosing that the incumbent CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, is stepping down from his apex role to become the Chair of DeepMind and the Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
But the bigger news came just on the heels of this development, with Jeff Dean, a 27-year veteran at Google and the architect of its AI strategy, announcing his departure along with that of Sanjay Ghemawat to form a new public benefit corporation, called Discovery Loop, to further the cause of AGI. As the lone saving grace, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google will become a founding member and a cloud partner of Discovery Loop.
Of course, this upheaval could not have come at a worse time for Google, with its frontier credentials on AI models now at stake. Cognizant of the yawning precipice that it now faces, Business Google is reportedly negotiating with the San Fransico-based startup, Mechanize, to improve the coding abilities of its Gemini AI models in a deal that might be worth as much as $1.5 billion , and might involve hiring some key Mechanize team members.
So, let me get this straight: Apple is paying Google around $1 billion per year to supposedly distill Gemini models for its Apple Foundation Models (AFM), and now Google is mulling a payment of $1.5 billion to Mechanize to improve its own models? What kind of weird circular financing-type arrangement is this? Apple might as well license Mechanize's expertise directly.
In what is truly a sad state of affairs, Google was the original architect of LLMs, but ceded leadership to OpenAI because of its bureaucratic sloth, and now finds itself trying to find salvation with nascent AI startups. How the mighty have fallen!
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