Person
Sundar Pichai
Named in AI Lately's reporting below.
In the archive
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.
Compute & Silicon
Power, Water, and the Microsoft Claim
Microsoft's water-positive pledge for 2030 omits the baseline figures that would let outsiders verify it, even as Virginia's data center water draw climbed 86 percent and the national grid absorbed a historic voltage event.
Arts & Media
Paid by the Answer
Google has quietly started paying a few dozen publishers when their work shapes an AI answer, a small and secret check for the very traffic its own AI summaries have been draining away.
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.
Policy & Regulation
Six AI Companies Sign Trump's Voluntary Safety Pact
Six executives, including Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang, promised President Trump four layers of audits, and Sen. Mark Warner says Washington just told AI to regulate itself.
Frontier Models
Gemini 4 Argon Tops Google's Own Chart and Divides Google's Staff
Google's new flagship leads 12 of the 18 tests on its own chart, and vetted cyber defenders get it first. Artificial Analysis scores it level with GPT-6 Astra, and some Google employees told Bloomberg it stumbles on real coding work.
Safety & Security
Sam Altman Rejects Anthropic's Push for Binding AI Rules
Sam Altman says the world should accept AI's harms as the price of its benefits, directly rejecting Dario Amodei's push for binding safety tests with government authority to block unsafe releases.
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.
Hiring & Talent
Hakeem Gaines Switches Tracks, and Every Row Arrives
Hakeem Gaines moved his fashion archive, Trainspotting, from SQLite to MySQL with help from AI, then proved every row arrived with checks he designed.
Capital & Markets
Abel Lifts Apple, Alphabet to 35% of Berkshire
Berkshire's latest SEC filing puts Apple and Alphabet past a third of its stock portfolio, with a new stake in Bending Spoons added this month.
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.