Does Google even want to win at AI?

AIMode News Desk · curated summary

August 13, 20263 min readTechnology

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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…

Key takeaways

01Today 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?
02That’s because last week Google announced a bombshell reorganization of its AI division, Google DeepMind.
03Jeff 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.

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