Has Google Given Up on AI? Maybe It Has Simply Graduated from Being a Research Lab

Over the past few days, I have seen the same story everywhere I look on YouTube and social media.

“Google’s AI operation is collapsing.”

“DeepMind is finished.”

“Top researchers are leaving in droves.”

The headlines are so dramatic that they make it sound as though Google has already dropped out of the AI race.

To be honest, I am not particularly interested in Google’s personnel changes themselves.

Who becomes CEO or who leaves the company has little to do with me.

But when the entire world makes this much noise, I do become curious: What exactly is everyone so worried about?

So I looked into the background.

What I found was more than a routine story about executives and researchers changing jobs.

To me, it looked as though Google had decided to graduate from being the world’s greatest research lab and accept the realities of being a giant platform company.

Google Can No Longer Remain Just a Research Lab

The simplest way to describe the situation is that researchers and executives are looking at different worlds.

Researchers want to build the smartest AI in the world.

More precisely, they want to create real AI beyond what exists today.

They are pursuing AGI—artificial general intelligence that can think like a human, learn by itself, and generate new knowledge on its own.

Beyond that lies the singularity.

That is the future many researchers are really looking toward.

Executives, however, are looking at something much more immediate.

Gemini makes Search more useful.

Google Workspace gains more subscribers.

Advertising revenue grows.

AI investment produces a return.

Those are the results shareholders reward.

The two goals may look similar, but they point in completely different directions.

Since the arrival of ChatGPT, AI has moved from an era of publishing papers into an era of competing through products.

Google is no exception.

No matter how elegant an algorithm may be, that alone will not satisfy shareholders.

Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Workspace—Google’s priority is to put AI into services used by billions of people and turn that technology into profit.

The emphasis has shifted away from the research-lab ambition of “Let’s pursue the singularity” and toward a more practical goal: “Let’s deliver AI that is smart enough, reliably, to a massive number of users.”

This Is Nothing Unusual in the IT Industry

I have spent many years in IT, and this pattern is hardly rare.

Engineers want technically elegant designs.

They want to try the latest technology.

They believe there must be a smarter way to solve the problem.

What the company wants, however, is a product it can release next month.

Delivering on schedule matters many times more than whether the technology is the best in the world.

The engineers feel slightly frustrated.

Management says, “This is good enough.”

I have seen this disconnect many times over the years.

The AI industry is not special in that regard.

Google Has Its Own Way to Win

Google’s real strength is not AI itself.

It has Search.

It has YouTube.

It has Android.

It has Chrome.

It has Gmail.

It owns enormous services that people around the world use every day.

Taken to the extreme, that means Google does not necessarily have to keep building the smartest AI itself.

If it can safely integrate AI that is smart enough into those services, it already has a viable business.

Researchers may find that future boring.

From a shareholder’s perspective, however, it is an entirely rational choice.

But This Strategy Has a Weakness

What follows is my own theory.

Enterprise AI tends to become increasingly cautious because companies place such a high priority on safety.

Prevent serious errors.

Avoid answers that might provoke a backlash.

Refuse anything that appears dangerous.

As a result, the answers become more rounded and inoffensive.

The safer they become, the more personality—and sometimes intelligence—they seem to lose.

I hear similar assessments of Microsoft Copilot.

I do not use Copilot every day, so I will not make a definitive judgment. My wife does use it regularly, and her description is simple: “It is safe, but not very smart.”

The AI a company considers ideal and the AI a power user wants are surprisingly different.

We may therefore end up in a world where people use Google’s AI for routine work, but turn to OpenAI, Anthropic, or a new startup when the work becomes genuinely difficult.

The race to create real AI—to reach AGI or even the singularity—may be led not by the product divisions of giant corporations, but by small, agile groups of researchers and startups.

Google Has Not Given Up on AI

The public reaction to the latest news has focused on the idea that brilliant people are leaving Google.

Of course, their departure may be a loss for the company.

But from another perspective, Google may simply see them as talented graduates going out on their own.

If their startups succeed, Google can acquire them.

Or perhaps they will become major Google Cloud customers.

If they fail, the market will filter them out on its own.

Of course, reality is not quite that simple.

Even so, under capitalism, there are times when having the world’s largest acquisition budget is more rational than maintaining the world’s greatest research lab.

That may sound brutally pragmatic.

But a public company cannot be run on dreams alone.

Google has not given up on AI.

It has probably chosen to be a platform company that generates profit from AI rather than a research lab devoted to pursuing the singularity.

Researchers who dream of real AI will move on to new startups.

Several years later, giant companies will incorporate the results into their services.

Ironically, this division of roles is exactly what made Silicon Valley the world’s greatest center of innovation.

The public says, “Google is losing its geniuses.”

But from Google’s perspective, the response may be no more dramatic than: “Congratulations on graduating. If you succeed, let’s talk about an acquisition.”