Demis Hassabis, the Nobel laureate who led Google DeepMind from its founding, stepped down as CEO on August 5 as Alphabet restructured its AI division; the departure follows model delays and a wave of high-profile engineer exits from the Gemini team; Alphabet stock fell sharply on the news
Google DeepMind launched Gemini Robotics 2 on July 30, a new family of AI models that enables humanoid and other robots to coordinate full-body movement, perform fine manipulation tasks, and collaborate with multiple robots simultaneously; a demonstration with Apptronik's humanoid showed the system screwing in a light bulb with 92% success, and picking up a watering can and clearing trash
Google launched Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber on July 21; the flagship 3.6 Flash is priced at US$1.50/US$7.50 per million tokens and claims 17% fewer output tokens than its predecessor, but third-party benchmarks show it below Meta Spark 1.1, Grok 4.5, and GPT-5.6 Luna at the same tier
Google DeepMind pushed Gemini 3.5 Pro from June to July 17, 2026, after discarding the existing 2.5 Pro architecture entirely; Alphabet lost US$225 billion in market value in a single session; four senior DeepMind researchers departed for rivals; DeepSeek is forcing an API migration for all users by July 24
UK-headquartered AI research laboratory owned by US Alphabet that builds the Gemini model family and created AlphaFold, earning its researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
US technology company that holds roughly 90% of global web search, facing concurrent antitrust monopoly proceedings in the United States and the European Union as of 2026.
The combined US$700bn-plus annual capital investment by US tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, directed almost entirely at AI data centers.
A coding/agent model plus Google-hosted sandboxed 'Antigravity' agents; older image previews shut down 25 June
Amazon ~$200bn, Microsoft ~$190bn, Alphabet $175–185bn, Meta $125–145bn, a combined AI buildout larger than most national budgets, with component inflation now a line item