DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?
What would that even look like? Paid search engines exist and they are niche products.