Does Google even want to win in AI?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for the show comes from Enjin.
Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think.
Enjin is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels, and in 2025, Enjin customers save more than $300 million on travel. With zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Enjin every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at enjin.com/decoder.
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do, so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:19)
Sponsored by Deepgram, the leader in voice AI, so you can use voices like mine.

**Nilay Patel** (1:26)
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, 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 about to lose 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 co-founder and current CEO, Demis Hassabis, is stepping aside to focus on longer-term research inside of Google. 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 really debate what we think is really going on. Also, at its core, this is an org chart story. 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.
Hayden Field, The Verge senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder.

**Hayden Field** (2:34)
Thanks.

**Nilay Patel** (2:34)
It's great to be here. It's always chaos when you're here, Hayden.

**Hayden Field** (2:37)
It really is. There's no week off, I feel like. Every week, something crazy is happening.

**Nilay Patel** (2:42)
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, was a Google fellow, 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 just 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.
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 just look at all of these ingredients and you're like, Google should be the runaway winner. Instead, I would say over the last week, a lot of people have said, well, Google is 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?

**Hayden Field** (4:13)
I feel like it's really bad, but I do think people are forgetting how powerful Google is and how much they own. Like all of the integration they can do, all of the tools, all of the data they have on us. I mean, I think they have a huge safety net, is what I'm saying, like a huge cushion. Even if they make huge mistakes and are falling behind, I still think you can't count them out completely because they have so much power. However, it's crazy to me that they have that much power and all that going for the company, and they're still not in the lead, let alone being kind of behind as of right now. That's what I think is crazy. And Sundar and Demis both made that point in their statements last week. Sundar wrote that the company is committed to being at the frontier and they're focused on the areas they need to improve, which is CEO speak for like, we know we need to get our shit together.