From Scoop to Scoop

A notable interaction on X happened recently where someone posted what looks to be an inside scoop of the internal state of why there's big names leaving Google DeepMind. Take with this what you will and the weight of who it's coming from, but it seems notable:

After the release of Fable 5 and with GPT-5.6 looming, the mood behind the scenes at Google DeepMind is increasingly one of frustration and broad discontent over the lab's perceived fall into a distant third—or even fourth—place. 

"I can't blame Noam [Shazeer] for walking. He won't be the last big name to go, either," a well-connected DeepMind employee told me. 

DeepMind's last major model release, 3.5 Flash, was a significant jump over its predecessor; however, it was not meaningfully better in most cases than 3.1 Pro, released back in February. In real-world use, it remains several steps behind the frontier. That was four months ago, and Google's best model now sits in a lowly fifth place on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index—lapped by models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and now China's Zhipu AI. Other releases have proven similarly disheartening: the small video generation model Gemini Omni Flash launched to little fanfare and was easily beaten by ByteDance's Seedance 2. 

Gemini 3.5 Pro, slated to launch June 30th, is "not the step change we need to be truly competitive in the race [to AGI]," per another individual at the company. The consensus seems to be that leadership at Google has all but conceded that race to Anthropic and OpenAI, and that "only a big shake-up" will propel them back to the highs of mid-to-late 2025. 

But employees are not hopeful: "We no longer have a frontier model in text, image, video, voice, or even vision... if we can't release a real frontier model after over four months of work with all of these resources, what are we doing?"

Mostly important, and more credible is that Logan Kilpatrick, member of technical staff on the Gemini team, responded to this post: 

everyone I know is hopeful and locked in, lots of things in the pipeline that will hopefully pay off short and long term : )

Competition is good and I love this level of grit and scale these changes will be making. With Google having split focus from product with Apple and the Pixel/Android team, Science with the AlphaFold DeepMind team, and Engineering with the Google AI Studio team, Google seems to be at a scale that we haven't seen in years. And that's not even mentioning their work in infrustrature with Google Cloud and Tensor chips.