This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era.
Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms.
The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.
I’d guess Google’s execs are unhappy with the way they’ve been left behind in LLMs.
The position at Anthropic seemed to be that LLMs were not the way forward.
They may prove to be correct over the long term, but commercially that view is “wrong”.
It’s a divide between a research oriented and commercial point of view.
For DeepMind, this is what happens when you take the money. Very rational to do so at the time, but it does have inevitable long term consequences.
For Google, it’s repeating the same mistake they made before: they should be taking the long view and looking beyond the tech we have today to leapfrog their competitors. But tbh I’m not sure such a behemoth can do that (I have no idea how Steve Jobs managed to do that). They’d have been better to reallocate some of the capex to letting Demis do his thing.
Another way of putting it: this is the opposite of “founder mode.”
His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no?
P.S. I think his real interest is Isomorphic, and his new role will offer fewer distractions.
Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.
He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.