RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Today on Decoder , 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 losing 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 cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside to focus on longer-term research.
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.
Also: At its core, this is an org chart story — and what is Decoder about if not org charts?
Okay: Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on what’s happening at Google DeepMind and the future of AI research. Here we go.
This interview had been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hayden Field, you’re The Verge ‘s senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder .
Thanks. It’s great to be here.
It’s always chaos when you’re here, Hayden.
It really is. There’s no week off. Every week something crazy is happening.
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’s now the chairman of DeepMind. He’s going to focus on bigger research. Jeff Dean, who had started Google Brain, 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 a lot of reactions to this news. 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.
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 power to put AI in front of people, putting AI in Search, its resources, it feels like it should have always been the winner.
As you reported from the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial, everyone was afraid of Demis Hassabis the whole time . You look at all of these ingredients and you think, “Google should be the runaway winner.” Instead, I would say over the last week, a lot of people have said, “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?
It’s really bad, but I do think people are forgetting how powerful Google is and how much they own. All of the integration they can do, all of the tools, all of the data they have on us — they have a huge safety net, is what I’m saying. 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 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. Sundar wrote that the company’s committed to being at the frontier and they’re focused on the areas they need to improve, which is CEO-speak for, “We know we need to get our shit together.” And then Demis wrote that the company’s “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.” Both of them acknowledging that is pretty crazy.
It’s not looking good for them, but it reminds me of someone with a trust fund. They have a fallback. Don’t count them out yet.
That trust fund is Google Search. They have a product that billions of people use and that 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 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. 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.
But Hayden, a few 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.” He said, “Yeah, that was hard.” Here’s a clip:
Sundar Pichai: It was tough to convey it outside, but 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. To me it was a way to go and a...
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