Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's former chief operating officer, left the company this week to start something new, the latest in a series of leadership shake-ups at the artificial intelligence lab. His exit came days after a $7 billion tender offer that allowed OpenAI employees to sell their shares. Six days earlier, four of Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) most important engineers departed.
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le left to found Discovery Loop, a start-up built to automate scientific research. This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia.
For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue » The same day, Demis Hassabis stepped back from running Google DeepMind, where he was replaced by veteran Koray Kavukcuoglu, the last Gemini co-lead still at the company. All eight authors of Alphabet's seminal research paper "Attention Is All You Need" -- which in 2017 introduced the "transformer" model that now underlies AI large language models -- have now left the company.
These latest talent reshufflings are just a few chapters in a story that's playing out across Silicon Valley. Top researchers from Meta Platforms, Alphabet, and OpenAI are leaving those tech giants to build AI-powered applications at private start-ups, all while demand for AI is accelerating, especially at the enterprise level. Revenue from Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure grew 43% last quarter as it topped $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time, while its commercial backlog grew 84% to $678 billion.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services (AWS) revenue climbed 37% in the second quarter, its quickest pace in nearly five years, and the annual run rate revenue for the company's AI business surpassed $25 billion while growing by triple-digit percentages. Alphabet's Google Cloud revenue grew 82% last quarter, and it ended the period with a $514 billion backlog. Despite losing the coding war to Anthropic's Claude Code, Gemini Enterprise is still widely adopted across the Fortune 100.
The hyperscalers are building the infrastructure for the next era of computing. But there's still a debate surrounding who will profit most from the model layer and the applications that run on top of it. So, where is the next wave of innovation going to come from in big tech?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
