Person
Demis Hassabis
Named in AI Lately's reporting below.
In the archive
Opinion
People Are the Product
Four hires explain AI strategy better than any earnings call: Alexandr Wang to Meta, Varun Mohan to Google, Fidji Simo to OpenAI, Krishna Rao to Anthropic. Reading them is AI Lately's method.
Hiring & Talent
Google DeepMind's Retention Playbook
A $2.4 billion Windsurf acquihire, Koray Kavukcuoglu's promotion and Demis Hassabis's step-back from chief executive trace how Google answered an exodus that sent Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer toward rivals.
Hiring & Talent
The Compensation Revolution
Meta's nine-figure packages and a run of license-and-hire deals worth billions, from Microsoft's Inflection buyout to Google's Windsurf pickup, show incumbents paying for entire research teams while structuring around the merger review a straight acquisition would trigger.
Frontier Models
Gemini's Momentum
Gemini 3 Pro's November 2025 launch and a Search overhaul unveiled at Google I/O 2026 built the product momentum Demis Hassabis's research organization needed, even as Jeff Dean led three senior colleagues out the door to found a rival science venture.
Capital & Markets
The Year of the Acqui-Hire
OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia and Cognition spent a combined tens of billions in 2025 and 2026 buying companies mainly to secure the specific people running them, a pattern regulators are only beginning to name.
Safety & Security
The Signal Brief: Monday's Manifesto, Market Rout, and the Guardrails Clash
Dario Amodei's weekend essay calling for AI to pace its own frontier won rival endorsements within hours, erased tens of billions in market value, and collided with a White House that brands safety guardrails a conspiracy.
Safety & Security
The Caution Cartel: Four Rival AI Chiefs Agree to Slow Down
Dario Amodei's essay calling for a deliberate AI slowdown won public backing from Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis within a day, turning four competitors into a coordinated bloc that markets, Congress and the White House are still working out how to answer.
Hiring & Talent
The Signal Brief: Forty Founders and a Frontier Kill Switch
Google DeepMind's own alumni have founded more startups than OpenAI, Anthropic or Meta, Gavin Newsom ordered frontier labs toward a kill switch, and Microsoft's stock jumped on a Copilot that finally writes code.
Hiring & Talent
Forty Founders: How DeepMind Built the Rival It Fears
Google DeepMind has produced more startup founders than any rival lab, and four of the newest ventures are raising billions to prospect for the technology that replaces the transformer it still sells.
Hiring & Talent
DeepMind's Founding Generation Leaves to Build Rivals
Nine senior Google DeepMind and Google Brain scientists left in 2026 to found or join four separate rivals, and Google says its bench stays deep.
Safety & Security
Altman Pitches the Outcome He Called Dystopian
Sam Altman pitched OpenAI staff three AI endgames, including one where a single firm outruns every rival, which he publicly called dystopian weeks earlier.
Frontier Models
Google's Gemini 4 Carbon Tops the AI Rankings
An independent index ranks Google's new model first, built mostly on cybersecurity skill its own chairman says the industry still must secure.
Research
Genie 4 Speaks, but Only to Testers
Google DeepMind's new world model adds sound and lets testers steer scenes by typing, though only its chosen testers can try it.