Following the departures of Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean, the author (seconding SemiAnalysis) argues DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab. The core problem is Google's bureaucratic and timid culture — DeepMind had an AI chatbot a year before ChatGPT but wasn't allowed to release it — while Hassabis's world-model vision diverged from the text-and-code focus of other labs. ✦ AI generated
Stratechery author · Stratechery · 2026-08-11 · original ↗
For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab. We said as much a few months ago to our Tokenomics clients due to large numbers of departures from their reinforcement learning teams and poor compute allocation. Google will continue meandering on and releasing models, but their odds of reaching SOTA again have dropped to zero. ... The issue with Google was not Jeff Dean nor Noam Shazeer, but rather their extremely bureaucratic, painfully slow, and strategically timid culture. Remember that DeepMind had an AI chatbot 1 year before ChatGPT but was not allowed to release it due to fears of disrupting their core business.
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