Why Google is losing its top AI developers
Google's parent company, Alphabet, valued at $4 trillion, is facing a difficult strategic dilemma. While its cloud division reports an 82% revenue growth, the company is experiencing a significant wave of departures among key scientists, including Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, who is leaving after 27 years.
Google's parent company, Alphabet, valued at $4 trillion, is facing a difficult strategic dilemma. On one hand, the company's cloud division is showing excellent performance with 82% revenue growth, and 90% of the top 100 US companies utilize its artificial intelligence services. On the other hand, the company is experiencing a significant wave of departures of key scientists who led the technology's development, headed by Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, who is leaving after 27 years.
The battle for computing power and bureaucracy
The departure of Dean, along with other prominent scientists like Sanjay Ghemawat and Oriol Vinyals who are launching a new startup, reveals deep frustration among the company's researchers. Sources at Google told CNBC that many researchers feel frustrated by the difficulty of gaining access to the computing power required to develop advanced models. According to the same source, while internal researchers are forced to wait for resources, Google prefers to sell its unique TPU chips to external clients, including competing companies like Anthropic, to boost the cloud division's revenue.
Added to this is Google's burdensome bureaucracy, which requires numerous approvals to move research to the product stage. For scientists who prioritize lab work over financial reports, younger and more flexible companies like OpenAI or Anthropic have become much more attractive. Dean's departure follows the resignation of all eight authors of Google's seminal 2017 AI paper, including Noam Shazeer, who moved to OpenAI shortly after Google paid about $3 billion to bring him back to the company.
Does Google even need the best model?
Parallel to these departures, deep structural changes are taking place. Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, is stepping down from the CEO role to become unit chairman and Chief Scientist at Alphabet, while Koray Kavukcuoglu will manage the ongoing development of the next Gemini model. This shift reflects an attempt to align the research division more closely with the business division of Google Cloud, under the management of Thomas Kurian, which is recording great commercial success and driving the stock up 16% this year.
The big question now is whether Google should continue to invest billions in developing the most powerful models or settle for more efficient and cheaper alternatives. Market experts estimate that for 90% of business use cases, existing models are already "good enough." However, for scientists striving to push the boundaries of technology, this approach may accelerate the brain drain to competing companies.
