The news surrounding DeepMind is coming thick and fast. The well-informed Guardian spoke with former executives, and they all see the developments heading in the same direction: "The era of DeepMind as an independent actor is over."

I think we will learn even more in the coming days and weeks. But the fact that Demis wanted to leave DeepMind together with Jeff Dean and numerous key researchers speaks volumes, and adds further weight to the statements made by former executives.

Without a doubt, not all is lost. And let's not forget that Google researchers authored "Attention Is All You Need," the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning modern LLMs. However, the authors worked at Google Research and Google Brain, not DeepMind, which was still a separate organization at the time.

Still, storm clouds are gathering over Google. The company has a strong foundation, custom-built TPUs, highly profitable core products, world-class computing infrastructure, and deep resources. Yet confidence in Google DeepMind as a leading frontier AI lab appears to be weakening. I hope the skeptics are wrong and that Gemini 4 becomes the big comeback.