- Demis gets kicked upstairs: loses day-to-day power over DeepMind, gets fancy “Chair + Chief Scientist” title so he can do TED-talk AGI destiny stuff and Isomorphic Labs instead of running the actual product machine. - Koray takes the real job: owns the models, research, Gemini, and shipping. Reports straight to Sundar. Operators over visionaries. - Jeff Dean and Sanjay peace out after 27 years to start their own nonprofit-ish thing. Google seeds it so they don’t walk to a rival with all the institutional knowledge. - Official line: “Accelerate AI + shape AGI for humanity.” Actual move: tighten operational control, keep the science-fiction narrative alive for PR/regulators, push commercial models harder. - Full-stack bragging and “950M users / singularity foothills / cure cancer” language is pure corporate theater. The org chart is the only signal that matters. - Google is in a knife fight with OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI/Meta. This is them optimizing for speed and productization while still sounding noble.
> Full-stack bragging (...) is pure corporate theater.
I think Google is just about as full-stack as possible when it comes to AI. They do design their own ML hardware, they do tons of research, and do everything in between including hardware drivers, ML libraries (JAX), and the physical datacenters.