I'm honestly not sure about that. They need a decent LLM to fight off the threat of LLMs replacing search, but I'd say that Gemini 3.6 Flash is more than good enough for that, with a smaller/cheaper model being preferred to a larger one. If you are "searching" for a proof to the Jacobian conjecture, then try Fable, and I doubt Google will miss the advertising revenue if Anthropic manage to sell Terrance Tao a pair of socks.

More to the point, DeepMind seems to have become a product division charged with building LLMs, not a blue sky research institute chasing AGI. To the extent that continued LLM improvement is important to Google, the relevant question is how much do you need to pay for a competent ML/LLM developer?

>you sound like an MBA

Well, no - techie here.

I wasn't sure if you were suggesting that DeepMind should pay more just because people developing LLMs at other companies are paid more, or because these are elite DeepMind researchers and are objectively worth more than other Google developers. My point being that it seems they are no longer being used as elite researchers - they are LLM developers. Does Meta need to pay FAANG salaries to employees that have been repurposed as data labellers?