I think this is a classic case of playing to googles strengths. Google has a reputation it needs to work on, and moving fast in chasing the AI trend will probably not work out well. Instead they are playing a long game, using researchers and long term vision when it comes to product development and AI.

This guy sounds like he was cooked up by the writers of Silicon Valley:

> Their initial efforts to raise capital were complicated by a challenge confronting Hassabis still: Many investors lack the patience to embrace distant concepts. “What’s your product?” they would ask, he recalled in a company-sponsored documentary about DeepMind last year. “It’s like so prosaic a question.” His answer: “The most important thing of all time.”

It’s also interesting how corporate execs like this can eschew core tenants of capitalism such as “what is your product?” and “what is it going to cost?” as “prosaic” and boring while burning extraordinary amounts of capital in the process. Quotes like the above are going to be looked back on with the same kind of scrutiny that SBF got after his scandal if the AI play goes sideways.