Google is expanding its AI empire — and losing the people who built it
📰 source: cnbc_topnews · 💼 business
google's cloud division grew 82% in revenue, but the company's ai brain trust keeps shrinking. chief scientist jeff dean left after 27 years, and demis hassabis stepped down as ceo of google deepmind to become chairman. koray kavukcuoglu takes over daily model development.
all eight authors of the landmark 2017 transformer paper have now left google. noam shazeer went to openai in june, less than two years after google paid nearly $3 billion to bring him back. nobel laureate john jumper also left for anthropic. researchers are frustrated over limited compute access while google cloud sells tpus to outside customers, including anthropic. bureaucracy slows research-to-product pipelines.
ceo sundar pichai says 90% of fortune 100 companies use gemini enterprise, but some investors and analysts argue frontier models aren't necessary for most enterprise work. tomasz tunguz of theory ventures said many reasonable models are good enough. dan niles of niles investment management said a ford works for 90% of use cases. the tension: google must decide whether to chase frontier ai or let competitors foot the bill while it sells infrastructure.
why it matters: google's ai talent exodus and compute trade-offs could undermine its frontier model ambitions even as cloud revenue surges.
source: cnbc_topnews
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