Inside Google’s AI culture clash

Happy Thursday from Los Angeles. I’m headed up to the Bay Area next week for Google’s I/O conference on Wednesday. It feels like an unusually consequential I/O this year for reasons I get into below. If you’re reading this and will be there as well, I’d love to meet up.

In case you missed it last Friday, I was on Slate’s “What’s Next” podcast with Stephen King and Jon Favreau to talk about the past year of Twitter drama. You can find the show at this link and listen in your podcast player of choice.

Two weeks ago, Google announced what will likely go down as its most consequential reorg in years: DeepMind, the London-based AI research group acquired by Google for over $500 million in 2014, will merge with Google Brain, the search giant’s in-house research group headquartered in Mountain View. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the combination of the two groups will “significantly accelerate our progress in AI.”

I’m told the timing of the news shocked employees on both sides, including some senior folks who were hearing that a merger likely wouldn’t happen for at least several more months. Now that it’s official, the hard part starts.

As has been well documented over the years, Google Brain and DeepMind have operated as independent fiefdoms with totally different cultures. Under the leadership of Jeff Dean, Brain has historically fostered a bottom-up work environment that gives wide latitude for researchers to pursue their interests and publish their work externally. DeepMind, by contrast, is known for a more top-down culture where CEO Demis Hassabis spins up teams to tackle specific challenges. Researchers there have complained that “they have to battle through layers of internal approval before they can even submit work to conferences and journals.”

In my conversations with Google employees over the years, I’ve heard enough to know that integrating the teams won’t be easy for Hassabis, who is now leading the combined group as CEO of “Google DeepMind.” Some Google employees have privately grumbled that DeepMind is more focused on marketing and hype than delivering breakthroughs for the industry like Brain’s seminal Transformer research, which the “T” in ChatGPT stands for. DeepMind, meanwhile, lost its battle to gain even more independence from Google in 2021.

“Neither side ‘won’ this merger,” according to Brian Kihoon Lee, a senior Google Brain researcher who was recently laid off. “I think both Brain and DeepMind lose. I expect to see many project cancellations, project mergers, and reallocations of headcount over the next few months, as well as attrition.”

The coming reorg will be a test of where power lies. Is it with Google’s leadership team, which clearly feels a newfound sense of urgency to ship AI products and consolidate focus? Or is it with the company’s highly-paid, increasingly-vocal AI researchers who have a plethora of competing firms knocking down their doors with job offers? (“Brain drain” from Google has already been a problem for some time.)

As a DeepMind researcher put it on Twitter when the merger was announced, “DeepMind may be the only company to ever be acquired by Google twice.” The first time, Google was swooping in to outbid Facebook and secure early dominance in the field of AI. This time, Google feels suddenly behind as the AI race is heating up like never before. It won’t be easy to integrate two radically different organizations while also trying to compete.

That’s it for this week. If you aren’t already subscribed to Command Line, you can do so here.

I’ll be back next Thursday. In the meantime, if you have any feedback on this edition or fun theories about the coming AI apocalypse, let me know. Thanks for subscribing.