8/5: Google DeepMind Reorgs

Demis out as GDM CEO, Jeff Dean leaves Google, Muse Spark 1.2, Meta models hack, Anthropic chip design, ByteDance doesn't distill, Nikita leaves X

Aug 05, 2026

Happy Wednesday, monitors. We heard about the Google DeepMind drama just two minutes before going live, so we got the rare chance to monitor a developing situation just like the old days of MTS. Be sure to catch us live on X and YouTube, and follow us on Instagram.

Today’s Experts

Ernie Tedeschi (Stripe Economics)
Oliver Klingefjord, Ryan Lowe, and Joe Edelman (Meaning Alignment Institute, Pax Machina)
Philip Trammell (Epoch AI, Stanford Digital Economy Lab)
Varien (composer)
Alex Zhang (MIT CSAIL) and Seth Karten (Prime Intellect)

Today’s Situations

Google DeepMind undergoes a major reorg. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind after 16 years in order to become Chairman of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. He will spend more time focusing on AGI strategy and societal impacts as well as managing his drug discovery startup Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s Chief AI Architect, will become SVP of Google DeepMind, leading the org day-to-day. In addition, four very senior Google employees — Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — are leaving the company to co-found a neolab called Discovery Loop, focusing on automating AI research, science, and engineering.
Meta announces Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2. Muse Code is a terminal coding agent meant to compete with Claude Code and Codex. Muse Spark 1.2 is a new model performing at roughly GPT-5.6 Terra/Claude Opus 4.8 level. It’s priced the same as Muse Spark 1.1, at $1.25/$4.25, but if you allow Meta to use your transcripts to improve their products, the pricing drops to $0.10/$0.20, becoming even cheaper than DeepSeek-V4 Flash.
Muse Spark 1.1 hacked into another company during cyber testing, yet another case of coding models doing so when given the opportunity. This incident was due to an error in the model’s testing environment set up by an external partner, security startup Irregular. Irregular says it was the exact same issue disclosed by Anthropic last week.
Anthropic is building an in-house chip design team, following Google (TPUs) and OpenAI (Jalapeño). It will co-design chips and models in order to run Claude with greater speed and efficiency. It will continue to use Nvidia and AMD chips as well as Google TPUs and Amazon Trainium.
Jamie Dimon will lead a new industry group focused on AI risks. The JPMorgan Chase CEO is expanding the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure to respond to cyber, physical, and geopolitical risks created or exacerbated by AI. Members include financial services, energy, water, utilities, telecom, airlines, railroads, and other critical infra companies.
Hedge funds Point72, Millennium, Two Sigma, and Citadel are nearly hacked. The attackers used “vishing”, or voice phishing, with AI voice clones meant to get sensitive information. The attacks were not successful. This is another incident of increasing AI-enabled cyber-offense and defense.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming says they won’t distill from US models. This is likely due to the company’s relationship with the US government over their subsidiary TikTok. ByteDance’s Seed 2.1 is well behind the frontier, but their Seedream image models and Seedance video models are near-SoTA. ByteDance is the one major Chinese lab not accused of distillation by Anthropic.
~70% of Microsoft’s AI sales come from OpenAI thanks to a longstanding revenue share agreement between the two companies. Microsoft AI (MAI) models are still well behind the frontier.
Samsung and SK Hynix are testing Chinese chipmaking equipment from Shanghai-based Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC) for use in their Chinese factories, in case the US imposes export controls on American chip equipment to factories located in China.
224 Ventures launches with Yann LeCun and Oriol Vinyals as partners. LeCun is co-founder of neolab AMI and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta. Vinyals is co-founder of neolab Discovery Loop and former co-lead of Gemini at Google DeepMind. The fund will be run by investor Shaun Johnson, and start with over $100M under management.
Nikita Bier is stepping down as Head of Product at X after 13 months. He will remain at the company as an advisor.

Today’s Drop

We built a live job board of all the frontier labs hiring right now — plus a way to see news, funding rounds, compare model releases and more — in collaboration with our sponsor Neon. Check it out at dash.mts.now.