THIS WEEK IN AI: Google's Big Change, AI Keeps Breaking Out, OpenAI vs Apple

**Josh** (0:00)
Welcome back to the Weekly Roundup, our favorite episode of the week where we can catch you up on all things AI, frontier technology, all the crazy things that happened. And this week is no exception. We had the biggest shakeup in about 30 years at a company, a little company named Google. We had a counter lawsuit happen from OpenAI to Apple, saying, wait a second, you're totally lying. We have updates for the AI breakout. So much so, like this story about where the AI broke out of the system, that some of these frontier companies at OpenAI are actually slowing down training progress because they're so kind of timid on how to handle this. Starting with Demis Hassabis, man. I mean, Demis Hassabis is gone. He's not working at DeepMind anymore. Not gone from Google, I should say, or better yet, Alphabet. But Demis Hassabis, in his current role as the CEO of DeepMind is kind of no longer. And this seems like a pretty big deal. Cause for those of you who followed Demis for an eternity, this has basically been his thing. He has been in charge of DeepMind, Google acquired them. Now he is within Google and now he is gone from DeepMind. So what on earth is happening here? I read this and I was like, wait a second, Demis stepped down from what?

**Ejaaz** (1:05)
I think everyone was blindsided by this news yesterday. So Demis Hassabis, just for context, is like one of the godfathers of AI. He kind of like grandfathered a lot of the ML research at Google, even prior to Google, like he was heralded as one of the top AI researchers. And he's led Google's AI efforts on Gemini and everything else for a number of years. Now, he announced yesterday that he's stepping down from the role of CEO of DeepMind to become the chair of DeepMind. That's an indirect way of basically saying, I'm throwing in the towel and I'm done here. And what he's now going to do is focus on wider societal impacts of AGI and try to figure out how Google can kind of deal with that, as well as wearing an alternative hat, a new role, where he's going to be focused on something called Isomorphic Labs, which is a company he founded and spun out of DeepMind, which is essentially an AI lab, which creates designer drugs. So this is a big shock and news for everyone because Google, as you may know, was falling behind in the AI race. They had like a kind of lead at the end of last year. And then since then, they never really released a model that was noteworthy. And Anthropic, OpenAI, and in some cases, even XAI and Meta have now caught up and surpassed Gemini 3.6 Flash, which I believe is their latest model. He's being replaced by a guy called Corey. He is currently Google DeepMind CTO, and he's being now promoted to the Senior Vice President role. He has a lot of experience in AI, but that's not even the major news about this Google stuff, Josh. I don't know if you saw it, but the grandfather, the godfather of Google DeepMind. And Google in general, his name is Jeff Dean. He was employee number 30 at Google. He's been there for, I think, around 27 to 29 years. Dedicated his life there. He's responsible for creating some of the most amazing and major and pivotal products at Google. Google Search, the TPUs, Google Voice, anything and everything he has touched is leaving. And he's taking with him one of the most amazing senior fellows at Google. I believe his name is Gemawat. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correct, but Sanjay Gemawat. And they are co-founding with two other Google employees, a new startup called Discovery Loop. Josh, did you look into this company?
It's a pretty awesome company.

**Josh** (3:21)
The company is incredible. Before we talk about the new company, I want to talk about the old company because Jeff Dean is like, it's hard to overstate how legendary this man is. And for reference, there are levels at these companies that go from level one engineer and this kind of dictates how you get paid. So when you join a large tech company like this, level one is kind of like entry level, that's at the bottom. And then you go to level twos, which are people out of college. Level threes often have masters or PhD degrees. Level four is several years of like actually working there. Level five and six is kind of where most progression stops. Like I'd say the top 10 percent are probably sitting there. Level sevens are principal engineers, which are even smaller. And then eights and nines gets progressively more and more intense. Then there's level 10, which is Google Fellow. That is in like absolutely legendary honor of a lifetime. It's similar to earning like a Nobel Prize or something. There's just like not many people who are fellows.