What Google is up to now

New 09-02 (recorded 09-03): SHIPPED GEMINI 3.8 FLASH AND 3.8 FLASH CYBER at 11:00 ET — third Flash in six weeks at unchanged pricing ($0.75 / $3.75 per million tokens), 54.9% on HLE-Verified, DeepSWE v1.1 claims against larger frontier models; the Cyber variant goes to "trusted defenders" through a new Fairwind Program, Google's own lab-run gate alongside OpenAI's Daybreak and Anthropic's CVP. Gemini 3.5 Pro is still "AWOL" per 09-03 coverage while four Flash models shipped in 106 days. Also: Michigan City, Indiana moved to a moratorium on future data centers while exempting Google's $832M "Project Maize" already under construction (second reading 09-15); OpenAI's Effingham school-meals grant sits in the same backlash pattern. Berkshire's Abel called Alphabet "a significant player" 09-02 (on berkshire-hathaway). New 08-29: a WSJ exclusive (08-26) reports Google moved its roughly 90-person AI responsibility team -- CBRN risk, human-AI interaction, chatbot-psychology research -- out of DeepMind and into global affairs/lobbying. Two DeepMind staff told WSJ they fear this cuts the team off from the models it is meant to evaluate, an internal governance signal distinct from the market/leadership moves logged below. New 08-28: repriced, and not on earnings. Bloomberg put Alphabet down roughly 15% from its 05-13 all-time-high close of $402.38 to $340.65 on 08-27 — around $700bn of market value gone since May (Bloomberg's headline says $700bn, its own URL slug says $692bn; both are Bloomberg's). The attributed causes are people and schedule, not results: Jeff Dean's departure to found a startup taking senior colleagues, Hassabis stepping down as DeepMind CEO, earlier researcher losses to Anthropic and OpenAI, Gemini 3.5 Pro behind schedule with coding singled out, and free-cash-flow concerns tied to a $25bn early-August bond offering. Counter-move the same day: Barret Zoph joined Google DeepMind as VP of Research on RL and post-training, under Kavukcuoglu — inbound senior talent in the exact week the outbound flow is being priced. NOTE Bloomberg blocks every fetch transport available here; this rests on its own syndication mirrors carrying the Carmen Reinicke byline, not the page itself. New 08-16: still quiet since 08-14 — no Google-specific development in either day's sweep. The only adjacent mention is Alibaba's Qwen family passing 3 billion open-weight downloads (08-15), more than Google's and Meta's combined — a China-stack story, not a Google move (see the china/alibaba-qwen entries). Standing picture below holds. New 08-14: Berkshire Hathaway's Q2 13F, filed on the SEC deadline (16:05 ET), confirmed and hardened the 08-08 move into filed-position numbers — the Alphabet stake very nearly doubled in share count (57.83M to 106.0M combined Class A/C, +83%) and its dollar value grew even faster ($16.63B to $37.76B, +127%, share growth plus price appreciation), with no other AI-adjacent equity joining it anywhere in the 29-issuer portfolio. Same day, Google let Gemini/Flow users toggle off the visible watermark on AI-generated images, video and music via a new setting (the invisible SynthID mark and C2PA metadata stay regardless) — a pointed contrast to Anthropic taking backlash the same week for making its own Claude watermarking mandatory with no opt-out. New 08-13: shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash, a coding/agent-focused update at half its predecessor's token price. DeepMind leadership-transition coverage kept recirculating this week (a fresh wave of "Hassabis chair, Kavukcuoglu CEO" pieces, plus an uncorroborated single-outlet claim about a Nvidia-proposed DeepMind governance paper in Nature) but the coverage critic traced it back to the already-old transition and an already-old Hassabis governance-body remark from 07-14 — no material update beyond the 08-05/08-06 picture already carried here. New 08-10: quietly open-sourced TPU Raiden, an Apache-2.0 library for moving KV-cache data between chips during serving — the TPU-stack answer to Nvidia's NIXL, flagged by SemiAnalysis rather than announced, not yet recommended for general use by its own repo. Small as code, larger as a signal: the first concrete move toward externalising the TPU stack the way Nvidia externalised CUDA. Standing picture: pouring capital into the buildout — 2026 capex guidance $195-205B, "significantly more" flagged for 2027. Pretraining Gemini 4, testing Gemini 3.5 Pro, supplying the model layer for Apple Intelligence outside China (see apple entry for the China-specific Alibaba deal). A participant in the White House pre-release review framework. Owns its mines (TPUs). Destination traced 07-27: a 15+ state site land-grab + India, solar-heavy power + the first Gen-IV utility PPA (TVA/Kairos '30). Guaranteeing a ~$15B bank loan for Nexus Data Centers' Anthropic-leased Texas campus (~20% project equity). Leadership reset at the top of the lab (08-05/06): Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman + Alphabet's Chief Scientist, Koray Kavukcuoglu promoted to DeepMind SVP reporting direct to Pichai, Jeff Dean leaves to found "Discovery Loop" (an AI-for-science PBC, four senior researchers, Google as founding investor) — reads as real succession (Kavukcuoglu already running Gemini day-to-day, including Gemini 4) rather than a sudden exit, per Semafor reporting that Hassabis had been delegating for about a year. Alphabet fell ~4-5% (~$160-200B) the day of the announcement. Unconfirmed backdrop: Google's models reportedly running ~6 months behind frontier coding capability.

as of 2026-09-03