SemiAnalysis's latest report is blunt: Google DeepMind is no longer a frontier AI lab — and the odds it ever gets back to state-of-the-art (SOTA) are, in the firm's view, exactly zero.
The firm argues DeepMind is losing top talent and compute at the same time. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals have all recently left Google to start a company together. Earlier, Noam Shazeer — who co-led Gemini — jumped ship to OpenAI, while Nobel laureate John Jumper joined Anthropic.
The compute picture is just as stark. SemiAnalysis estimates that from Q3 2026 through Q4 2027, more than 20 percent of TPU shipments will go directly to Anthropic — effectively locking up a huge amount of scarce compute for Gemini's rival over the long term.
SemiAnalysis ultimately pins the blame on Google's organizational culture, which it describes as bureaucratic, slow, and strategically conservative. It even likens today's Google to IBM and Intel: the technical chops are still there, and the money still adds up — but the hardest, riskiest technology race may no longer be the company's top priority.