In the article “Google’s Westinghouse Bet” published on Asimov’s Addendum, Tim O’Reilly presents an alternate thesis regarding the organizational shifts, talent departures, and strategic shakeups at Google DeepMind.

While industry reports (such as a analysis by SemiAnalysis) interpreted the DeepMind restructuring as evidence that Google is falling behind in the “frontier model race” against rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, O’Reilly argues that Google is not losing the race—it is choosing to run a different one.

SemiAnalysis thinks the DeepMind shakeup means Google is losing the AI race. It might be that Google is choosing to run a different race.