What if I told you that Google is out of the AI race?

It didn’t happen because Google lost, though. Despite an underwhelming I/O event earlier this year, several heavyweight departures, and a slower model release pace than its competitors, Google is still alive. It is out of the race because it withdrew. Weird, right? Why would Google do that willingly?

To answer that, I’m going to tell you the story of why and how Google left the AI race that OpenAI and Anthropic are betting everything on.

Here’s my hypothesis, stated plainly: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis—a pioneer of AI as we understand it today—doesn’t think that automating AI research with coding agents (AI systems that can program better AI systems) is the correct approach to artificial general intelligence (AGI, the kind of AI that’s as good as humans at everything). Google DeepMind’s leadership sees OpenAI and Anthropic’s bet at best as an off-ramp, and at worst as a dead end.

Hassabis is betting on something else: world models. Models that can understand and simulate the real world, not just predict the next token. — Read More