Leaked Google DeepMind report reveals internal discontent as its AI models slip to fifth place on industry benchmarks

🚨 SCOOP: After the release of Fable 5 and with GPT-5.6 looming, the mood behind the scenes at Google DeepMind is increasingly one of frustration and broad discontent over the lab's perceived fall into a distant third—or even fourth—place.

"I can't blame Noam [Shazeer] for walking. He won't be the last big name to go, either," a well-connected DeepMind employee told me.

DeepMind's last major model release, 3.5 Flash, was a significant jump over its predecessor; however, it was not meaningfully better in most cases than 3.1 Pro, released back in February. In real-world use, it remains several steps behind the frontier. That was four months ago, and Google's best model now sits in a lowly fifth place on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index—lapped by models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and now China's Zhipu AI. Other releases have proven similarly disheartening: the small video generation model Gemini Omni Flash launched to little fanfare and was easily beaten by ByteDance's Seedance 2.

Gemini 3.5 Pro, slated to launch June 30th, is "not the step change we need to be truly competitive in the race [to AGI]," per another individual at the company. The consensus seems to be that leadership at Google has all but conceded that race to Anthropic and OpenAI, and that "only a big shake-up" will propel them back to the highs of mid-to-late 2025.

But employees are not hopeful: "We no longer have a frontier model in text, image, video, voice, or even vision... if we can't release a real frontier model after over four months of work with all of these resources, what are we doing?"

🚨 SCOOP: After the release of Fable 5 and with GPT-5.6 looming, the mood behind the scenes at Google DeepMind is increasingly one of frustration and broad discontent over the lab's perceived fall into a distant third—or even fourth—place.

"I can't blame Noam [Shazeer] for walking. He won't be the last big name to go, either," a well-connected DeepMind employee told me.

DeepMind's last major model release, 3.5 Flash, was a significant jump over its predecessor; however, it was not meaningfully better in most cases than 3.1 Pro, released back in February. In real-world use, it remains several steps behind the frontier. That was four months ago, and Google's best model now sits in a lowly fifth place on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index—lapped by models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and now China's Zhipu AI. Other releases have proven similarly disheartening: the small video generation model Gemini Omni Flash launched to little fanfare and was easily beaten by ByteDance's Seedance 2.

Gemini 3.5 Pro, slated to launch June 30th, is "not the step change we need to be truly competitive in the race [to AGI]," per another individual at the company. The consensus seems to be that leadership at Google has all but conceded that race to Anthropic and OpenAI, and that "only a big shake-up" will propel them back to the highs of mid-to-late 2025.

But employees are not hopeful: "We no longer have a frontier model in text, image, video, voice, or even vision... if we can't release a real frontier model after over four months of work with all of these resources, what are we doing?"

🚨 SCOOP: After the release of Fable 5 and with GPT-5.6 looming, the mood behind the scenes at Google DeepMind is increasingly one of frustration and broad discontent over the lab's perceived fall into a distant third—or even fourth—place.

"I can't blame Noam [Shazeer] for walking. He won't be the last big name to go, either," a well-connected DeepMind employee told me.

DeepMind's last major model release, 3.5 Flash, was a significant jump over its predecessor; however, it was not meaningfully better in most cases than 3.1 Pro, released back in February. In real-world use, it remains several steps behind the frontier. That was four months ago, and Google's best model now sits in a lowly fifth place on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index—lapped by models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and now China's Zhipu AI. Other releases have proven similarly disheartening: the small video generation model Gemini Omni Flash launched to little fanfare and was easily beaten by ByteDance's Seedance 2.

Gemini 3.5 Pro, slated to launch June 30th, is "not the step change we need to be truly competitive in the race [to AGI]," per another individual at the company. The consensus seems to be that leadership at Google has all but conceded that race to Anthropic and OpenAI, and that "only a big shake-up" will propel them back to the highs of mid-to-late 2025.

But employees are not hopeful: "We no longer have a frontier model in text, image, video, voice, or even vision... if we can't release a real frontier model after over four months of work with all of these resources, what are we doing?"