alt Hacker NewsA few points:
1) the simplest explanation whenever a bunch of people leave [x] at a company at the same time, is that [x] is becoming less important to that company moving forward. It's not proof, but you know, everyone is trying really hard to say that's not what's happening here. Sometimes the simplest explanation is correct.
2) rumor is that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, got bored during pandemic lockdown and eventually returned to Google in a lower profile role, related to AI. I have to think that he still has a lot of say in what goes on in Google relative to his interests.
3) Yahoo Finance article says Hassabis "has long prioritized research over profits", so his replacement might indicate that Google has decided it is time for this stuff to pay for itself?
The breadcrumbs going back a year or so point to Deepmind wanting to be research heavy, but Google being more interested in hedging AI bets by selling compute. If you ever worked hard on something that you have a lot of conviction about, only to get denied resources for it, it's a pretty big gut punch.
There is another universe where Google is hard AGI forward, freeing up as much compute as possible for Deepmind, turning away OAI and Anthropic, and offering the uncontested premier AI research lab, by probably an order of magnitude or more compute. Gemini 3.5 ultra is limited availability with unreal abilities.
But their balance sheet becomes terrifying, and it's all or nothing that this plays, er pays, out.
Right now though Google is pretty well hedged. Even Chinese models likely just mean more compute sold.