Defections from Google DeepMind prompt questions about Alphabet’s efforts to stay at the forefront of AI

Welcome to Eye on AI. In today’s issue: Google Deep Mind loses top AI talent, raising questions about its status in the AI race Intelligence chiefs warn about imminent AI-driven cyber risks Open AI expands program for cyber defenders to use AI Lab makes RSI progress. That giant sucking sound you hear? That’s the woosh of talent streaming out of Google Deep Mind and flowing to Open AI and Anthropic. There was a time when I can remember Deep Mind bragging about how no one ever left the storied AI lab. That’s certainly not the case anymore. In recent months, a stream of well-known researchers have departed. Some, such as David Silver, one of DeepMind’s earliest employees and one of the top reinforcement learning experts in the world, have decided to launch their own startups (Silver’s is called Ineffable Intelligence). But others have joined DeepMind’s chief rivals. This past week, two Google DeepMind stars jumped ship in just 48 hours, both departures shocking in their own way for what they may say about Google DeepMind’s prospects in the AI race. That message was not lost on investors. News of their leaving sent Google’s shares tumbling more than 5% on Monday. A chatbot pioneer and a Nobel laureate exit First, on Thursday, Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving to go to OpenAI. Shazeer is the famed AI researcher who helped build Google’s earliest LLM-based chatbot system, LaMDA, in 2021, and then left in frustration when the internet giant dragged its feet in commercializing it. Before he left the first time, Shazeer is thought to have authored an anonymous memo, which later leaked, that criticized Google for having become too bureaucratic, slow-moving, and risk-adverse to succeed in AI against nimbler rivals, a critique that was seemingly validated when OpenAI launched the category defining ChatGPT in November 2022 and jumped out in front, at least in the public imagination, as the leading AI lab. Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, another Google researcher who had helped buil