Google is losing key AI researchers as its booming cloud business raises questions about the company’s commitment to frontier AI development.
CNBC reports the technology giant posted 82 percent second-quarter cloud revenue growth alongside a major AI shakeup: Chief Scientist Jeff Dean announced his departure after 27 years, and Demis Hassabis stepped down as Google DeepMind CEO to become the unit’s chairman.
Google published the influential 2017 transformer paper that enabled the generative AI boom and now faces a resource dilemma: advanced models demand massive upfront investment in computing power and research without guaranteed returns, while cloud growth outpaces Amazon and Microsoft.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on last month’s earnings call that 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise, evidence Google can sell AI services to cloud customers.
Some researchers are frustrated over compute access as Google Cloud sells TPUs, its proprietary AI chips rivaling Nvidia graphics processing units, to outside customers including Anthropic, sources said, with frustration running especially high when Google announces large infrastructure commitments to rivals whose models compete directly with its Gemini AI. Bureaucracy, with multiple layers of approval needed to move research into products, compounds this, making OpenAI and Anthropic more appealing to researchers who prefer laboratory work to commercial considerations.
Dean leaves with Google engineers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to start Discovery Loop, a Google-backed public benefit corporation that Dean said on X aims to automate machine learning, science and engineering to accelerate discoveries.
Prominent departures preceded them, including Noam Shazeer, who departed the company to join OpenAI. Breitbart News previously reported that Shazeer’s common sense comments like “it’s not okay to sterilize children” caused Google’s leftist employees to melt down:
According to a report by The Information, Shazeer clashed with colleagues on internal forums over posts expressing his personal beliefs. In one now-viral post shared on social media, Shazeer wrote that he doesn’t believe humans “have an attribute called gender” and that “it is not okay to sterilize children.” Shazeer added, “I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies.” Such common sense opinions are not typically found within Google. Breitbart News reported extensively on the case of James Damore, a Google engineer fired for his political views and personal beliefs.
Noam Shazeer is no ordinary tech executive. He is widely regarded as one of the founding engineers of the AI revolution. As a former Google Brain researcher, Shazeer co-authored several groundbreaking papers that laid the foundation for the transformer architecture, the technology that powers today’s cutting-edge AI models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
Gil Luria, a D.A. Davidson analyst who recommends holding Alphabet stock, said the pattern is clear. “They’re not interested in commercializing AI,” Luria said. “They’re interested in being part of history, and so they look at Anthropic, OpenAI or another startup as being the place where they can pursue history.”
Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, becomes Alphabet’s newly created chief scientist, focusing on longer-term research and the societal implications of artificial general intelligence, plus more time at Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company that grew out of DeepMind.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s technology chief and Alphabet’s chief AI architect, takes over daily management and development of the next Gemini model; a person close to the team said he had assumed broader responsibilities from Hassabis over the past year, directing model development and presenting major Gemini releases. Kavukcuoglu told CNBC in May that Google aims to push the frontier while improving efficiency, its Flash model delivering frontier-level capabilities while running four times faster than comparable models.
Major names in the AI field are playing a billion-dollar game of chess as they jump between competitors to win . Breitbart News Social Media Director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.