Does Google even want to win in AI?

My guest today is The Verge’s Hayden Field, and we’re discussing a question that’s been rocketing around the tech industry for the past week: Is Google losing the AI race? That's because last week, the company announced a bombshell reorganization of its AI division. You can read these moves, and Google’s reaction, in a lot of different ways. So I really wanted to sit down with Hayden to dig into some of the smartest analysis we’ve seen this past week, and what we think is really going on here. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: The messy politics behind Google’s big AI shakeup | The Verge Gemini is cooked but GCP is cooking | SemiAnalysis Google announced a major shakeup of its top AI leadership | The Verge AI lab musical chairs hits Google the hardest | Axios Demis Hassabis said this might be the ‘foothills of the singularity.’ What? | The Verge Google’s AI architect lived rent-free in Elon Musk’s head | The Verge Sundar Pichai on AI, search, and the future of the web | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our supervising producer is Greg Ott, and our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, about a question that's been rocketing around the tech industry for the past week. Is Google about to lose the AI race? That's because last week, Google announced a bombshell reorganization of its AI division, Google DeepMind. Jeff Dean, the company's chief scientist, is leaving to form his own startup. And DeepMind co-founder and current CEO, Demis Hassabis, is stepping aside to focus on longer term research inside of Google. You can read these moves and Google's reaction in a lot of different ways. So I really wanted to sit down with Hayden to dig into some of the smartest analysis we've seen this past week and really debate what we think is really going on. Also, at its core, this is an org chart story. And what is Decoder about if not org charts?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Okay, Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on what's happening at Google DeepMind and the future of AI research. Here we go.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Thanks. It's great to be here.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  It's always chaos when you're here, Hayden.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  It really is. There's no week off, I feel like. Every week, something crazy is happening.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  This time is a little bit different. The news happened last week. Google reorganized its AI division, Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis, who was the head of DeepMind, has ascended into Google heaven, where he is now the chairman of DeepMind. He's going to focus on bigger research. Jeff Dean, who had started Google Brain, was a Google fellow, left with a bunch of other people from Google to start a new lab that will run on Google Cloud. This is a big reshuffle of Google's AI efforts. It comes as Google is not competitive on the frontier anymore. There's just a lot of reactions to this news. And I wanted to just go through some of that reaction with you. You've done a lot of reporting on what's going on with Google, what's going on in the industry, and try to put this all into context for people.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  So let's just start at the start. Google is, by and large, the best positioned company to win AI. If you just look at what it is, how it makes money, its distribution powers, but AI in front of people, putting AI in search, its resources, it feels like it should have always been the winner. And as you reported from the Elon Musk, Sam Altman trial, everyone was afraid of Demis Hassabis the whole time. So you just look at all of these ingredients and you're like, Google should be the runaway winner. And instead, I would say over the last week, a lot of people have said, well, Google's going to lose, which I find fascinating. Is that your diagnosis of what's going on with Google? Is this just a catastrophe for its bleeding edge efforts?

• 4:17Speaker 03

  I feel like it's really bad, but I do think people are forgetting how powerful Google is and how much they own, like, all of the integration they can do, all of the tools, all of the data they have on us. I mean, I think they have a huge safety net, is what I'm saying, like a huge cushion. Even if they make huge mistakes and are falling behind, I still think you can't count them out completely because they have so much power. However, it's crazy to me that they have that much power and all that going for the company, and they're still not in the lead, let alone being kind of behind as of right now. That's what I think is crazy. And Sundar and Demis both made that point in their statements last week.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Sundar wrote that the company is committed to being at the frontier and they're focused on the areas they need to improve, which is CEO speak for like, we know, we need to get our shit together. And then Demis wrote that the company is entering a next chapter and that it has the ingredients to lead from here. And I firmly believe we will, AKA, we aren't yet, but we have the ingredients to do it sometime in the future. So I think both of them acknowledging that is pretty crazy. So yeah, basically, it's not looking good for them, but it reminds me of someone with like a trust fund. It's like, you know, they have a fallback. Don't count them out yet.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  That trust fund is Google Search. They have a product that millions of people use. They're putting AI into, as you and I have discussed many, many times, that is a consumer product. Consumer AI has not yet reached a point of making a bunch of money for a bunch of people, but everyone sees that as the prize. All of the action is in sort of enterprise AI right now. And you can see Anthropic is out to a big lead because of their focus on enterprise AI, and in particular, coding. One of the things I want to come back to is whether Google made the wrong bet on multimodality and world models, which Demis is really focused on, instead of these core enterprise use cases, and whether they even want to be at the frontier. They're saying they want to be, but maybe they don't.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Maybe they just want to sell cloud services to Anthropic, which is a business that is growing for Google. But hold that thought. I want to come back to that. Just put that in your brain. This is part of the framework that I'm thinking about. You just said, Sundar said, it's the next chapter. We're committed to it. They're making changes. Hayden, like five months ago, I was sitting with Sundar Pichai, and I asked him, hey, you just restructured this entire company. You got rid of all of your senior executives. You have all new ones. You made DeepMind. Here's, he said it to me. He was like, yeah, that was hard. Here's a clip.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  It was tough to convey it outside, but I was, you know, we had set the company, you know, I pivoted the company to be AI first. We had all the ingredients. So in some ways, I felt like the overton window had changed. People were adopting these technologies faster than we had expected. And so to me, it was a way to go and actually express ourself through our products. But I realized we had to organize ourselves for it. And going back to my earlier point, I realized we need a core models and a core infrastructure team to power everything we are doing across Google. So a lot of my initial energy was to go set that up. One AI team.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  We had world-class research teams in Brain and DeepMind, bringing that together as Google DeepMind, you know, which was, you know, hotter than it sounds because it's like saying, go put Stanford and MIT together and create a department out of it or a university out of it. So I think doing that well.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  That's Sundar saying, my company wasn't organized for the AI moment. We were slow to react to ChatGPT. I made this huge change to build a central infrastructure team. It's three months later, four months later, and the head of Google Brain is leaving, the head of Google DeepMind is becoming the chief scientist. Google DeepMind doesn't have a CEO anymore. It has an SVP. What do you read into that? Is that yet another reset? Or is it just more of the same?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  It's hard because I really do think it's both. I think it's a result of, Demis has never been interested in the productization stuff. He's, like you mentioned, really into world models and research and curing disease and drug discovery. And Jeff Dean is similar. So I'm not surprised. If you're being optimistic, you could view this as kind of just the ripple effects of the conversation you had with Sundar five months ago. But I also don't think this bodes very well for the company. Because whenever there's a bunch of executive shakeups, as we're seeing with OpenAI, literally right now, whenever there's a bunch of executive shakeups, people get nervous, people below

• 9:04Speaker 03

  them leave, people don't work as hard because they're thinking too much about things. Plus, a lot of the people that are working on AI at Google are there because of Jeff Dean or Demis. So what's going to happen now? I think that they're thinking about this, like solely on the page, logistical. Okay, who is best positioned to, you know, speed up our productization? Yeah, maybe that's the best decision. But when you take into account all the minds that are leaving and all the minds that will leave in the next couple of months, it's going to be rough, I think.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  There's a lot of controversy, or I guess curiosity, around Gemini 4, which is not yet out. They announced it at Google I/O. They put all their emphasis on the 3.5 class models. The 3.5 class models are not at the top of the leaderboards. They've actually fallen quite far behind. Does this strike you as the actions of a bunch of executives who think Gemini 4 is going to vault them back into the lead? Or do you think people are getting out because Google isn't as committed or focused to being on the frontier?

• 10:05Speaker 03

  I definitely think these are, as Semi Analysis wrote in its blog, not the actions of people excited about Gemini 4. So definitely not. I think Google is pretty committed to being a frontier lab. It's more, is it going to reach its goal? And my answer to that a few months ago would have been that it was a frontier lab. And right now, it's more of a wait and see. Like, it is right now, but is it going to fall out of favor? Semi Analysis put it, you know, more heavily, they said in their release, like, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab. To me, it's still got that designation, but I think in a few months, that might be very different. And I didn't anticipate that changing so quickly.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  I think there's a chance it could go the way of Meta, where they're suddenly get pretty behind and they keep promising things and then taking a while to deliver. So, and same with Apple, actually. So we'll see.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 12:54Speaker 02

  We're back with The Verge's Hayden Field, discussing how the leadership changes at Google DeepMind tell us a whole lot about what's happening in the AI industry.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  I'm glad you brought up Semi Analysis. It's an investment research firm. They do great work across AI and chips and thinking about how the math of all this should work out. That post really struck me as well. I just want to reuse some other parts of it. And there's a lot of this in which The Verge has covered Google for a long time. And there are echoes of this throughout our coverage of Google. And there are some parts of this which feel new to me. Like they're new problems for Google. So I'll just read you the quote, the longer version of quote you just said. As Hayden said, they wrote, "For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Google will continue meandering on and releasing models, but their odds of reaching the state of the art again have dropped to zero." This strikes me as an incredible claim. Right? Like, we see the model race twist and turn all the time. And to say, well, Google will never once again hit the state of the art feels like an enormous claim. So that's the part to me that feels new. Right? Like, week to week in AI, anything could happen. Do you think there's evidence for that?

• 14:07Speaker 03

  I think that's really putting the cart before the horse. Like, you know, it's been a few months since we ourselves wrote about Gemini 3's hype. It was winning the model race for a few weeks until something else came along. I definitely don't think the odds have dropped to zero for them reaching state of the art again. I mean, you know, in a way, they're cutting out some of their research focus and just going all in on products. So, I mean, if they're really going all in on that and they find a way to put all their efforts behind that, I feel like they will reach state of the art again. However, what this will be is them constantly catching up right after another frontier lab. And then the other frontier labs that invest in research more

• 14:53Speaker 03

  and long-term stuff are going to be pulling ahead. And it's kind of the same thing as like, you know, if you're a writer and someone keeps copying you, they're always going to be right behind you. They're not going to be thinking of the next thing like you are. So I feel like that's what, that's what I foresee end up happening here. If you're not really investing quite as much in the longer-term research and all these niche areas that, you know, for example, Jeff Dean startup is going to be looking at. I feel like they could reach state of the art again, but it's not going to be, you know, them coming in the lead over and over again. I think.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  That's the part that felt new to me. I don't really know how to evaluate that claim, especially as Google's AI division changes leadership. I don't, I can't read Sundar's mind. I've tried many times. It's very difficult to see what's going on in his head. I don't know if he wants to win that race or if he thinks Gemini is good enough now to make a bunch of money inside of Google's products. I really don't know how to evaluate they'll never be at the state of the art again. The part I do know how to evaluate is the second part of the Semi Analysis claim here, which it just, anybody who has paid attention to Google will immediately understand and immediately agree with this, I think. They go on to say, perhaps there's some world in which Google reaches the state of the art again, but we think the odds are basically zero. The issue with Google was not Jeff Dean or Noam Shazer,

• 16:06Speaker 02

  who we should talk about, but rather their extremely bureaucratic, painfully slow and strategically timid culture. That's Google. Like, I literally sit with Sundar once a year and say, tell me about your culture and tell me about this bureaucracy. There's something about Sundar saying to me at I O, I made DeepMind the center of the company and then everything else is productizing their development. And then all the people leaving and Semi Analysis saying they'll never be at the frontier again because their culture is so bureaucratic. That is uniquely Google to me. It feels very familiar. I know you've talked to people at Google since all these announcements. Is there a sense that Google's culture needs to change even more to go and compete?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  There's a reason that so many people are flocking to Anthropic right now. Anthropic is not perfect by any means. They have a lot of red flags as well. But, you know, I'm seeing a lot of people from OpenAI, from Google, from Meta flock there because, as we've reported on a bunch of times,

• 17:09Speaker 03

  people in this space are a little bit post-money. A lot of times, they don't care just about the salary or what they're making. They care about working for a place that aligns with their values that they believe in. And Google has really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way when it comes to that. I mean, Jeff Dean and Demis had both in 2018 signed a public letter saying that AI shouldn't be used for lethal autonomous weapons. You know, Jeff Dean had been tweeting in the months before he left Google about, you know, the fact that mass surveillance could be a really big problem with AI. And Jeff Dean even signed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic with the whole Department of War situation with Google,

• 17:52Speaker 03

  which Google ended up signing and just kind of letting the Department of War do whatever with their AI. So I could see a lot of people fleeing in the next few months because Jeff Dean seemed to be, according to my sources that I spoke with, they're the person keeping a lot of people at Google. So, I don't know, I could see a big exodus happening in the next few months.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  This is one of the bigger questions. Who was the keeper of the morals and values of this team inside of a Google that seems to be more willing to play ball with the Trump administration, with the Department of War, with the uses of AI that some people are very, very skeptical or very, very skittish about? There's been a lot of reporting about the fact that when Google acquired DeepMind and Demis, they signed a pledge to never use DeepMind's technology for military purposes. That has just been watered down. Jeff Dean recently was in fact saying, we should not use AI for these purposes. There are people inside of Google who've signed a letter. There just seems to be a lot of big-name talents who are saying, we don't want to commercialize this stuff in the way it's being commercialized right away.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  The problem is that it's the governments and the militaries who are spending all the money right now. And Google is good at making money. I think it wants to fund AI development with actual revenue instead of raising endless amounts of debts like the startup frontier labs are doing. Is that conflict navigable for Sundar and whoever's running AI now? Or is it that just the reality of being a huge corporation that funds its efforts with revenue?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  It's unfortunately not surprising to me for a huge corporation in the US where you have to maximize shareholder value. I mean, they're subsidizing a lot of their AI efforts right now. It seems like to me, for example, the other day, I vibe coded a new website for myself and Gemini was the only tool that I could use the free version of for like nine hours. I was like trying to do it as an everyman, so I wasn't signing into any of them. I was just like, which one will let me go like with the free version and do a ton of stuff? It was only Gemini. So, I mean, they're really trying to get people in their corner here and trying to, you know, change developers' loyalty, change engineers' loyalty over to them. So. They need money. And to be fair, I do think they could do this a lot differently if

• 20:03Speaker 03

  they wanted. I mean, they're one of the largest corporations in the world, and they're making a lot of money in other areas, you know, they, they don't have to be doing this, but that doesn't mean they won't. And I think they will continue. But I also think, like I mentioned, that's going to lead to a lot of brain drain. One of the current Google employees I spoke with said that a lot of people around him felt like losing Jeff Dean was a big blow for morality at Google. And that also, it continues like a brain drain they've been seeing, and that mediocrity is the likely result. So kind of like what you were saying, you know, they may be always catching up from now on and never, you know, forging a path ahead like they had been, you know, six months ago.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  I think this brings me back to that framework I mentioned at the very beginning that I wanted to put a pin in. Does Google want to win at the frontier? Or can they just sell Google Cloud at enormous high rates to Anthropic and OpenAI while maintaining usable models for its consumer products at high rates? Right? There's a world in which Gemini is there for you to search your Gmail and provide AI overviews and be cheap enough to run to let consumers vibe code websites for nine hours at a time. But the real money is in selling TPUs in Google Cloud to Anthropic, and Anthropic is going to go collect the government money, and Google is just there as a vendor, and they're selling to Anthropic

• 21:29Speaker 02

  and OpenAI and whoever else needs data center capacity. We can see Google Cloud as a business that is exploding. They don't seem to mind that they're selling their own capacity to Anthropic instead of Google's own products, which is one of the challenges of running a company that has frenemies as customers. How do you see that playing out? Do you see Google ever saying, look, we have to win at the frontier, we have to win at AGI, we have to make sure recursive self-improvement of coding occurs so the next model works, which is a religious belief inside of OpenAI and Anthropic? Or do you see them saying, actually, being one or two steps behind the frontier is fine, because that'll make our products work well enough, and we'll just sell capacity to the people chasing the AGI dream?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  The way they are right now, I think they're going to keep chasing it because their investors want that. It makes their stock go up to say, hey, we're chasing this, we're at the frontier, we're the only large corporation that's almost or nearly or equally caught up with OpenAI and Anthropic. You know, they don't need to go the way of Amazon and, in my opinion, Meta, right now. I think, you know, in a year or two, if they have continued the brain drain and they keep falling behind or something, yeah, maybe they're gonna do what you said in situation two. But I think that for now, there's no reason for them not to keep chasing, especially because that's a great thing to talk about on earnings call, and it makes everyone, just all your investors, happy.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  We have to take on a short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility and availability varies, 18 plus.

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• 25:10Speaker 02

  We're back with Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, trying to answer a big question. Can Google ever hope to win the AI race? The AGI piece is really interesting to me, especially in the context of Google. Demis Sabas was the final speaker at Google I/O. And after, you know, an hour and a half of very practical demonstrations of AI inside of Google products, Demis came out and he talked about protein folding and drug discovery, which are the things that he really cares about. And then he ended the entire presentation by saying, very confidently, we are at the foothills of the singularity. Google doesn't say AGI, they say the foothills of the singularity, which is an enormous claim. And I thought, boy, that's an incredible way to end Google I/O. And then later, I sat down with Sundar

• 25:54Speaker 02

  and I said, do you agree we're at the foothills of the singularity? What does this mean to you? Here's what Sundar said to me.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Demis and I have had long, deep conversations on this topic. I think in this context, I think for him, the advent of AGI is what he thinks of as the singularity. And, you know, and I-

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Do you have a definition of AGI? Have you debated? Do you have an agreement?

• 26:12Speaker 04

  We, we debated a lot. I think both Demis and I are very close to how we think about and, you know, think about, we think about AGI and, you know, in, there is a harder definition of AGI, which is, you know, that, that it has to be more comprehensively do, you know, the wide range of tasks, including cognitive tasks, in a way that's comparable. So I think we'll at some point actually put it out as a company, I think, and we are working on that. But I think that that's what he's talking about in this context.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  I've been thinking about that answer since it happened. Do you know what Sundar's definition of AGI or the singularity is based on that?

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's the exact same as everyone else's. You know, in the OpenAI lawsuit, you know, in the materials, we saw the definition of AGI come out of that. It was published, and it sounds like he's talking about the exact same thing. In Microsoft and OpenAI's 2019 contract that was made public as part of the Musk v. Alman trial, it's a 36-page agreement, but luckily, finally, we're finding out their definition of AGI, which is a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. So seems similar to what Sundar is saying in terms of cognitive tasks. It's

• 27:35Speaker 03

  just, you know, a highly autonomous system that can do a ton of economically valuable knowledge work at the same level or, or surpass the level of humans. So that's, that's the definition I've been working with for, you know, the past six years on the beat. And it seems like that's, that tracks with what he's saying.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  He said to me, Google would put out a definition of the singularity or AGI, and they're working on it. As far as I know, they have not yet released this definition. I don't know if it tracks the OpenAI one. I do know that's basically what the industry says, right? That it'll be better than you and me at economically viable tasks. They've stopped saying that.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Better.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Either way, we're losing our jobs, right? They've stopped talking about it because that means we're all losing our jobs. So that's just faded into the background. I bring this up because Demis is so focused on science, and in particular, health outcomes. And in this announcement about him moving on to be chief scientist, Sundar repeated the phrase, we're at the foothills of the singularity. Like, it feels like Demis wanted to chase AGI and world models and protein folding and all of the next things. And the thing that makes AI economically viable today is writing software code, right? Or automating business processes inside of Fortune 500 companies, or agentic shopping, or whatever

• 28:59Speaker 02

  boring thing Google needs to do to make money. And those things are getting ever farther apart. And if you want to chase the foothills of the singularity and AGI, maybe that has nothing to do with how Google needs AI to make money today. That's a big part of the Google culture clash, right? That's we're going to chase money and shareholder value instead of holding fast to our ideals. That's a big part of the AI industry's general chaos. How is OpenAI going to make a dollar? Who knows? It's a code red. We're right back at the beginning. How do you see it? Is it Demis wanted another Nobel Prize, so he led them astray, and now he's getting kicked upstairs, and they're going to focus on money? Or is there real validity to, we're going to go let him chase the singularity while we work on Gmail search?

• 29:43Speaker 03

  I think there's a big difference between we're going to go let him chase the singularity and we're going to let him do a lot of research into biology and drug discovery and the other stuff he's into. And that seems to be what he's going to be doing. Basically, it seems like him and Jeff Dean are going to be doing similar things, but very different places. And I think it's a tale as old as time. I've been writing about this for so many years, product versus research, the big clashes, the funding, the resources. Companies want products immediately, and they don't want to invest in the long-term research that sometimes leads to those products. They only want the, the quick, okay, how are we, what are we going to turn this into? What's the timeline? Let's speed it up for

• 30:25Speaker 03

  products. And let's, you know, compete with all of our, you know, three competitors and not really do these long side projects that may lead to something or may not. So, you know, I think the tension's building and building, especially as OpenAI and Anthropic are about to go public. You know, Google has a lot of investors to answer to. I think this is just like a building of the tension we've been seeing for so many years. And for what it's worth, I do think the Demis situation was probably mutual. I think he was, I've heard rumors that maybe he wanted to leave completely, but it would be too dramatic for him to leave and Jeff Dean to leave at the same time. So he said, yeah, I'll handle, I'll go to this other role and then I'll leave later. That's just a rumor. We're not sure. But either way, it doesn't seem like he was totally kicked

• 31:10Speaker 03

  to the curb or kicked upstairs. It's more probably a mutual parting where he really is not that interested in products and he wants to do the long-term research. And a lot of these guys are like that.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  It feels like a real situation where you have to be careful what you wish for. Because when Sundar created Google DeepMind, he had to pick a winner and he picked Demis over Jeff Dean. And we were all waiting to see if and when Jeff Dean would leave because he didn't win. And now they're both leaving because Demis realized that actually operating inside of Google is a very different job than just doing the research. One of the questions I have here in general is about DeepMind itself, which is famously headquartered in London, kind of answers to no one, right? It's Google's big fancy AI research arm with the big fancy CEO. That's getting pulled down, right? It's being led by an SVP, reports to Sundar now. There are some reports that maybe the center of gravity and the authority

• 32:07Speaker 02

  is going to move back to Mountain View to Sundar himself. How do you see that playing out inside of Google?

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can definitely see the winds might be changing and the Bay Area might, you know, be the headquarters again, at least in terms of power. London's kind of autonomy has been going on for a long time. I've visited that office multiple times in London. It did have a different feeling to it. It felt like there was a lot less urgency in a good way. It was really collaborative. There is a lot of long-term research questions and it was a very different feeling than when, than the tension and the urgency I feel when I go visit other AI labs offices. So I think, you know, maybe Sundar got tired of that and was like, you know what? I need the pressure to rise. I need products quick. The research

• 32:56Speaker 03

  can only be done if it's going to lead to something that's trackable. Not sure, but I could definitely see the center of gravity moving to the Bay Area.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  I think the reporting from inside of Google that I'm most curious about is how that culture changes without these leaders. As you were saying before, Jeff Dean, Dennis Sabas, they were moral leaders in addition to technical leaders and research innovators. They kept Google from doing a lot of things. They're gone now. In some of your own reporting and your story on our site, there are people saying, who will we sell out to next? Sergey Brin, who's deeply involved in AI efforts, supports the Trump administration, Sundar obviously stood behind Trump at the inauguration. The questions from the staff about who, what will we sell out next? What values are up for sale next? Without the culture carriers of a Demis or Jeff Dean, seems like a question. Who's taking over DeepMind now? And what kind of person do we think they are?

• 33:48Speaker 03

  It's Corey Kavachulu. And I think that these questions are super valid because I don't think Corey's going to be speeding up on this stuff. I mean, he's a product guy. He's focused on speeding up the product. I'm sure he and Sundar have had a bunch of conversations about, you know, focusing on the short term. Over the past few months, you know, early this year, I was chatting with a bunch of AI employees at a ton of different companies. They all felt like the messaging from their companies, including Google, was like, shut up and focus on the mission, you know, keep your head down, roll stuff out, don't worry about what's going on in the outside world politically. And it seems like that's going to be even more of a thing now. One of the sources I was

• 34:30Speaker 03

  speaking with at Google said, speaking out on moral issues like ICE agents and AI surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons, Jeff Dean was one of the last people that was kind of willing to do that. And, you know, it doesn't seem like Corey is going to be, you know, really eager to take that place. So, yeah, I mean, I think these questions are really valid and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot more DeepMind people left after all these changes.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  So let me ask you the hardest question of all to wrap it up. There's a lot of noise in the ecosystem right now, saying that Google has lost the AI race. But as we said from the beginning, Google has a ton of advantages here. They're making money, which most of the other companies aren't. They are selling Google Cloud infrastructure to their own best competitors. They have massive distribution advantages in search, in Gmail, in the fact that Apple appears to have distilled Google's models for Siri. There's a lot here, right? Where Google just has structural advantages. They're playing with house money. They're trust fund babies. You've called them several times here. Is

• 35:38Speaker 02

  it possible to lose the AI race from that vantage point? Or is it really just about, well, if Anthropic gets to a point at recursive self-improvement that they can call AGI, everyone else has to lose by default?

• 35:52Speaker 03

  It's not possible for them to fail. I think it's possible for them to change up their strategy like we were talking about earlier. Maybe they become an Apple where, you know, they're running on Google AI and they're fine with that. But, you know, they're picking a different company. Maybe they, same with Amazon, you know, they've kind of given up a little bit. It seems like I'm going to get some flack for that. But Meta still really desperately trying, but they're, they're behind. Google, yeah, I mean, I don't think they can fail. I think it's more, do they eventually realize it's not worth their time? Does the brain drain continue? And do they realize, look, there's no amount

• 36:36Speaker 03

  of money we can offer to get some of the best minds back here. Let's just cut our losses. And I think that's a little ways off. I don't think that's going to happen in the next few months or even year. But yeah, I mean, it's important for these execs to remember, I think, that a lot of the people that are most involved and really pivotal in building this technology and keeping them at the frontier are extremely serious about their morals and what they're, what they're doing. They, they don't just do it for the money. So, you know, it's going to be tough to kind of resell that dream to some of them if they're trying to rehire after they lose people. OpenAI is experiencing the same thing. So, yeah, we'll see.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  It's worth noting, Demis is still there. He's the chief scientist. Presumably, he will still be going to the London office and being charming. And you can see all that continuing to happen. But what are we shipping? What are the roadmaps? Who gets the GPU access? That seems like it will change and that will have some downstream effect. If you had to look for signs, is Google succeeding or failing? Is the culture a problem? Or are they just retrenching to go and be even more aggressive? What kinds of things would you look for right now?

• 37:50Speaker 03

  What I typically look for is what they're really offering every time they have a big release and how pivotal it really is. Are they doing something that their competitors did six months ago? And are they even doing that well? That's kind of how I think about these things sometimes. You know, there will be a big release from an AI company or a big tech company that's trying to catch up in the AI race. Sometimes it's six months behind OpenAI or Anthropic. And sometimes the stuff that they're really excited about is pretty bad. So that's what I would be watching from Google. With Gemini 4, what can it really do? Does it have that same effect that Gemini 3 had on the industry where it's leading for at least a week or two? Or does it not even have an hour of

• 38:34Speaker 03

  lead time and it just kind of falls flat? And, you know, it's used by the enterprises that they work with and no one's really excited about it. That's the type of thing I'd be looking for. I'd also be looking for the amount, the exodus. Yeah. If a ton of the DeepMind engineers leave, you know, if they're desperately trying to hire and offering like more and more desperate pay packages, that's another sign. And then I think whenever Demis leaves, and I think that will eventually happen, that's, you know, a huge sign.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Well, we'll be looking out for all that. I'm confident that the chaos in the AI industry will continue. And Hayden, you'll be back on Decoder. Thank you so much for joining me today.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Thanks so much.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  I'd like to thank Hayden for taking the time to join me on Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're at DecoderPod as well, and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe every year podcast. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our supervising producer is Greg Ott. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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