When someone is moved to Chair at their startup it’s usually a gentle way to change leadership.

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.”