In huge news, in case you missed it, Sir Demis Hassabis has given up the reins at GoogleDeepMind (moving aside to be Chairman and Alphabet’s Chief Science Officer), and the rightly legendary Jeff Dean and some other top talent just left altogether, following earlier departures of star researchers like John Jumper, David Silver, Tim Rocktäschel, and Noam Shazeer. Google/Alphabet are hemorrhaging talent, morale is poor, and their latest model is delayed. Many are ready to count them out altogether.
I think this is a mistake. Here are seven reasons why:
Google still has access to an enormous amount of data, from search and email especially, at a scale that nobody else has.
Only a small number of companies (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, maybe a few in China) can match on sheer compute and expertise building distributed systems. Google/Alphabet has long had their own TPU chips, lessening their dependency on Nvidia.
Google still makes a ton of money, $402 billion in revenue last year, $132 billion in profit), and has vastly more cash to play with than OpenAI and Anthropic. (The fact that Google is going to the bond market yet again is worrisome, though.)
Google has great distribution, through Android, Mail, Search, Docs, YouTube etc.
Hassabis, arguably the most formidable person in AI, is still there, not gone altogether. He has worked together with his replacement, Koray Kavukcuoglu, for over a decade, and they will continue to work together. (I have spoken once with Koray and found him to be smart and sober, in a world where not all of their competitors are. His lack of name recognition may be a liability in the short-term, but his sobriety may be crucial in the long-run.)
Google’s most obvious competitors have troubles of their own. OpenAI has a declining reputation, Anthropic has conflict with the administration, Microsoft and Amazon don’t have the same talent pool.
Google can probably keep going even if it doesn’t take much of the LLM market in the end (which I expect will be a multi-way tie with relatively modest profits). On the other hand, if things do turn out as I expect, and there is a multi-way tie with relatively modest profits, Anthropic and OpenAI don’t have that much else to fall back on; they may never earn out their investments. The only real existential threat would be if Google loses Search, Android, and YouTube altogether. Google may simply outlast the other two.
Google definitely doesn’t look unassailable like they once did, and may never be as strong as they once were, but it’s premature to count them out.
I don’t read this shakeup like the rest of the world. I read it like they don’t need to innovate further in the space but will continue to roll it aggressively into all of their services and optimize it for everyday use by regular people. It may also signal they found the ceiling like some of us have suggested was near.
Google is already losing search by converting it to AI.
Why isn't this already another serious red flag?