Inside Google's Billion Dollar Bet To Win The AI Race | Logan Kilpatrick

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Logan Kilpatrick (0:59)

I think we are laser focused right now at the frontier. We're seeing all these early signs of recursive self-improvement. I think the other labs are seeing this as well. And so I think it's underscoring the value of...

Anthony Pompliano (1:09)

Today's conversation is with Logan Kilpatrick. He's a member of the technical staff at Google DeepMind. In this conversation, we talk about the AI industry, the Model Lab wars, what's going on at Google? Are they actually committed to the frontier? How are they investing capital internally? What are the specific products and the decision-making that's going on inside of Google DeepMind? How are the AI efforts in some of the other labs actually affecting their decision-making? And then how should you as an individual think about benchmarking, coding agents, different types of bots, and many other aspects of the AI industry that everyone's talking about? Logan is somebody who has worked at a number of different companies in the industry. He's very well versed not only in what Google is doing, but how the industry is developing. I think you'll find this conversation very valuable. Here's my conversation with Logan Kilpatrick.

All right, Logan, everyone thinks that Google is behind an AI race.

What do you think? What is your response to critics who believe that Google maybe is not near where they should be?

Logan Kilpatrick (2:02)

Yeah, it's a good question. I think my reflection of the last two and a half years is like, I think it's a fair criticism because people expect a lot of Google. This is what I try to remind myself. It's not people trying to be rude saying that Google is behind. It's like Google is an incredible company, have such a storied legacy. People expect high things of us. I think the tension point for us is, you look at this portfolio of stuff that we're doing. We're actually talking off-camera about this, everything from genomics work to weather and science, to new frontier models with Gemini 4, to we just released a bunch of new audio models, etc. I have this firm conviction that Google and DeepMind, we have the world's best portfolio of stuff. The tension is like the portfolio spikes in different ways, and this is a very natural thing.

I don't think that's an excuse to not be at the frontier, and so I think we are laser-focused right now at the frontier. We're seeing all these early signs of recursive self-improvement. I think the other labs are seeing this as well, and so I think it's underscoring the value of being at the frontier, and so hopefully, we'll see that with Gemini 4, but an immense amount of progress. I think you've seen this with the Gemini 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 line up of in literally 3-4 week increments, sometimes less, sometimes a little bit more, we're seeing very reasonable progress. Again, this is the early signs of this recursive self-improvement loop. Hopefully, we'll see that translate over in the same way to Gemini 4, and it will be our largest, most ambitious pre-training run so far.

I think it'll get us back in tension with some of the Frontier Labs.

Anthony Pompliano (3:47)

Talk a little bit more about this commitment to the Frontier. I think that is one of the things that people have always wondered is, you can go after general intelligence, you can go after specialized workflows, you guys have a business to run, you get a lot of cash, but also you're making a lot of bets on this being the future of the company. But I do think that when I speak to people at Google, maybe there's more of a commitment to the Frontier than people realize outside of the company.

Logan Kilpatrick (4:11)

Yeah. It's part of why I had this conversation with Cori, and he was making this verbal commitment to the Frontier. Cori is our SVP of DeepMind, leads the organization now, and is incredible. I love working with him, and he was making this verbal commitment. It's obviously been everyone's perspective internally for a long time, so I think he was doing it to answer a lot of these questions of, do we even care about it? I think this stems from folks asking the question about, why haven't we landed the pro model? Why are we pushing on Flash? Do we only care about Flash models now because we're shipping Flash? The reality is we were just seeing a lot of progress. There was a lot of juice to squeeze. The recipe that we had was working extremely well with the Flash models, and so there was this really tight iteration loop. People were getting excited about the progress, and they're like, hey, let's focus and make that happen.