How Google Pulled Off Its Stunning, Rapid-Fire AI Turnaround
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Google DeepMind
2 min read
The article describes DeepMind as Google's 'engine room' central to its AI turnaround, but readers may not know the full history of DeepMind's founding, its merger with Google Brain, or its major achievements like AlphaGo and AlphaFold that established its research credibility
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Tensor Processing Unit
12 min read
The article mentions Google training on its own TPUs as a competitive advantage over NVIDIA GPU-dependent competitors, but readers may not understand how TPUs differ architecturally, why Google developed custom silicon, or how this infrastructure shapes AI competition
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Demis Hassabis
12 min read
Named as the leader who unified Google's AI efforts, Hassabis's unusual background as a chess prodigy, game designer, and neuroscientist shaped DeepMind's research philosophy—context that explains why Pichai entrusted him with Google's AI centralization
Google came into 2025 with its AI stumbles looming large. The company’s slow start to the generative AI race turned borderline catastrophic in 2024 when its products generated images of diverse Nazis, told users to eat rocks, and couldn’t match OpenAI’s shine. AI chat was seen as a major threat to search, and outsiders didn’t see a coherent strategy. In January, Google stock was on the sale rack and murmurs about CEO Sundar Pichai’s job security floated around the internet.
We’re not quite in December and Google has masterfully reversed course. Its AI models are world class. Its products are buzzy again. Its cloud business is booming. And search is stronger than ever. Its stock is up 56% this year and, at $3.59 trillion, it just surpassed Microsoft’s market cap. Now, no serious person would question Pichai’s job status.
“It is absolutely a comeback,” Mark Mahaney, sr. managing director at Evercore ISI, told me. “It turns out that Google could generate a product just as good as ChatGPT. And when people realized that, they started buying Google stock again.”
Like most ‘overnight’ turnarounds, Google’s didn’t happen overnight. To pull it off, Pichai focused the company intensely on the problem, leaned on its longstanding technology investments, and fell into a bit of fortune as the ‘AI revolution’ proved slower than the hype let on. Today, years of work are showing results.
By far the most impactful change at Google amid its turnaround has been the centralization of Google DeepMind within the company. Pichai turned the AI research group into Google’s ‘engine room,’ as those inside put it, having the division develop core AI technology and then farming it out to the company’s many product areas like Search, Cloud, and Gmail.
“They went back to the technology stack to focus on making that world-class above all else, and then worry about the experience that’s going to enable as secondary,” one source at a rival AI lab told me. “Not the other way around. Not trying to build some ridiculous experience and get the technology to map.”
Google, historically, had been divided into product area fiefdoms, and Pichai’s decision to transfer some of their power to that ‘engine room,’ while not easy, led to real progress. “They took over with real agency that they were given from Sundar to make the critical decisions,” the source said. “What happened? Decisions got
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