ONE BIG THINGAt Google’s DeepMind, absence did not make the heart grow fonder
There’s an extraordinary quote in Bea Nolan’s account for Fortune of how Demis Hassabis lost his role as CEO of DeepMind, the London-based lab that created Google’s Gemini AI product. Apparently, Hassabis was largely absent from company offices: “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen Demis walk around the office in the Gemini area,” one DeepMind engineer said. (To be fair, he made plenty of media appearances.)
DeepMind had also seen a recent exodus of talent—in June, Google lost Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate and AlphaFold co-inventor John Jumper to Anthropic. And the product had fallen behind its competitors in terms of capabilities. So it is perhaps not surprising that parent company Alphabet, based 6,000 miles away in Mountain View, California, wants more direct control. Hassabis, who will now become the company’s chairman, will be replaced by DeepMind’s chief technology officer, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who is based in Mountain View and will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai at Alphabet.
THE MARKETSThe price of oil ticks up again
S&P 500 futures were up 0.14% this morning. The index closed up 0.62% in its last session.
