Referring to DeepMind in the UK? Ah yes, that’s definitely through acquisition.
But even though their AI models aren’t the absolute leaders in every field, all their models are near the top, across the board. Yeah, their recognition of this current dominant trend before any other major company has given them a big advantage in the number of fields they’ve applied AI to. For example, by putting their full weight behind DeepMind early on, they had a bunch of models before anyone else dealing with topics from protein folding to playing games. Think for them, this might be the right strategy. Explore as much in AI as you can, and figure out the ways it is truly revolutionary. Don’t focus so much on creating products that will make money today or even in near future. Take the long view… hmm, actually, a good example of this is Waymo, it seemed stalled out a few years ago, but is the clearly the best self-driving cars currently out there and finally growing market share.
Also, it was their researchers who kicked off the LLM race with their seminal paper on transformers in 2017 (yeah, they should have released an LLM first, but think they have made up for it since then).
Yeah, am trying not to be overly enthusiastic, but still, despite a couple of big mistakes in AI, they seem to have made mostly correct calls for the past ~10 years. It’s an impressive track record at least to me.
Similarly, I'm not trying to be overly damning. And again, I don't think what they are doing is necessarily a bad strategy. I just don't think of them when I think of good software practices, sadly. If anything, I think the opposite. In that there are few things more unstable than trying to take on a dependency of something they have done.
Do they largely make this work for them internally? Seems so, yes. But taking on any sort of dependency to Google is something you can only do if you can keep up with their very large developer base.