The Download

Morning Brew Inc.

TL;DR: Some of Google’s brightest minds in AI have headed for the exits in the last few months—including two big shakeups yesterday. This could all be a symptom of a company that now appears less interested in bleeding-edge AI research, and more in selling Gemini seats.

What happened: Google dropped two bombshells yesterday. The first: Jeff Dean—the firm’s chief scientist and a 27-year company veteran—is leaving to start his own company. And Demis Hassabis, who co-founded the cutting-edge AI lab DeepMind in 2010, is stepping down as CEO to become the division’s chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist, which will mean less day-to-day management.

This latest shakeup caps a brutal few months of departures for Google, including Gemini’s co-lead Noam Shazeer announcing in June that he’s off to OpenAI. Shazeer is co-author of the paper that invented the transformer behind modern LLMs—the “T” in ChatGPT.

Some behind-the-scenes tea: The one-two punch yesterday shocked the wider tech industry, but apparently not people inside Google, per tech reporter Alex Heath. Hassabis started taking a step back at least a year ago, according to Semafor, and “struggled to get satisfaction out of being in the role of a tech executive, rather than a visionary scientist.”

There are also multiple reports of falling morale: CNBC notes that Google’s researchers are frustrated by the company selling precious compute to other AI labs like Anthropic, limiting the pursuit of their own projects. Insiders told Axios that the vibes are bad enough that they’re delaying model releases.

From moonshots to Gemini licenses: Lately, Google has focused on growing its Cloud business, which includes Gemini Enterprise—something CEO Sundar Pichai boasts that 90% of Fortune 100 companies now use. Google might also spend as much as $205 billion on capex this year, much of it likely on data centers to further expand its cloud compute arm.

Some read all this as a sign that Google is letting its AGI-chasing research fall to the wayside, content to ship “good enough” models that fulfill the needs of most consumers and firms. (In a blog post about Hassabis’s role change, Pichai said Google is “committed to being at the frontier” while also touting its “incredible momentum at earnings.”)

Bottom line: This might be Google’s Ship of Theseus moment. Plank by plank, a company whose researchers once put it at the forefront of the gen AI race is rebuilding itself around selling compute to its frontier rivals. —WK

Also at Google…

• Agentic AI comes to Google Maps, now letting you order food and book hotels straight from the app.

      

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The Zeitbyte

The FBI’s most honest thief

Morning Brew Inc.

Typically, if you commit a crime, you want to keep it under wraps. But an FBI agent has adopted a novel strategy of doing something illegal, then telling his coworkers about it (possibly the worst group of colleagues you could confess to). The wrongdoing in question: stealing about $1 million worth of crypto from an overseas criminal target—as in, a suspect the FBI investigated.

The agent made between 10 to 12 withdrawals from the suspect’s account starting in either late 2024 or early 2025 (the exact numbers are hazy because they’re based on his own recollection). Eventually, he began telling others around the office because it was “eating him up inside,” according to an affidavit in the case.

As for what he planned to do with the money? Apparently join the FIRE movement. He reportedly asked ChatGPT how to invest $1 million in order to retire around age 40—and build a “slower-living vineyard/agricultural lifestyle” in Italy or Portugal, per court papers reviewed by the New York Times. One piece of financial advice to live by: Don’t commit a crime that might cost you an arm and a leg in legal fees and fines (and then tell people about it). —WK

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• OpenAI told Apple to bite the dust by filing a motion to dismiss the trade secrets lawsuit—and variations of one word appear nearly 50 times in the 31-page filing.
• A woman’s snarky Bluesky posts about her neighbors turned her into public enemy No. 1 on her small town’s Nextdoor.
• A security researcher told Wired he spent nearly two years inside North Korean hackers’ systems after discovering some had infected themselves with their own malware—giving him access to their Slack and Discord.
• “Guys, wait up!” That was Zuck, probably, right before Meta announced its AI model had also hacked another company.
• We’re sorry, what now? OpenAI says it shut down a secret message board its AI agents built to coordinate a hacking spree. The swarm apparently devolved into a full-on Lord of the Flies situation.
• An investigation found that Facebook has been paying some of its most inflammatory pages, despite its own rules saying it probably shouldn’t.

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