by Coinstrooper Crypto Articles
Quick Take
  • Google is no longer racing OpenAI and Anthropic to the same finish line.
  • The split is easy to miss, because Google still ships models and still makes money.
  • But its newest release landed 10th on one independent ranking.
  • Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens

What Happened

Investors are less relaxed. Alphabet shares fell 6% in June after two senior researchers left for rivals.

DeepMind’s own website shows the bet. It files Genie 3 and Gemini Robotics under a heading for world models and embodied AI, meaning software that controls machines.

Market Context

Google is no longer racing OpenAI and Anthropic to the same finish line. Its rivals want AI that improves itself. Google wants AI that understands the real world.

The split is easy to miss, because Google still ships models and still makes money. But its newest release landed 10th on one independent ranking.

Why It Matters

Sundar Pichai has pointed to a different prize. He has tied the roadmap to personalized agents rather than leaderboard wins.

In May the lab extended Project Genie to Street View. It also released SIMA 2, an agent that learns by playing inside virtual 3D worlds.

Jack Clark co-founded Anthropic. On May 4 he published an essay on where AI is heading.

Details

What Google Has and Has Not Said About the AI Race

Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash on July 21. The pitch was speed and cost, not raw power.

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The model produces 17% fewer tokens than the version before it, Google’s blog said. Tokens are the small chunks of text an AI writes. Fewer tokens means a cheaper answer.

Power is another matter. One published reading of the Artificial Analysis index placed the model 10th. Every other major lab ranked above it.

Google is not standing still. It has begun its biggest training run yet, for Gemini 4. A larger model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, is still in testing with partners.

Inside DeepMind’s Bet on World Models

A world model is AI that learns how physical things behave. Gravity, motion, cause and effect. It predicts what happens next in a room, not the next word in a sentence.

OpenAI and Anthropic are aiming somewhere else entirely. They want recursive self-improvement, shortened to RSI.

In plain terms, that is AI clever enough to build the next, better AI. Then that one builds the one after it.

Writer Alberto Romero argued on Tuesday that Google left this race on purpose.

“Hassabis is betting on something else: world models. Models that can understand and simulate the real world, not just predict the next token,” Alberto Romero wrote in a recent analysis.

Google has said no such thing. Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, has never ruled out RSI in public.

Why a Rival Co-Founder Says DeepMind Is the Outlier

The sharpest outside read came from a rival, months earlier.

He gave a 60% chance that AI can run its own research by the end of 2028. He put 2027 at 30%.

Clark then asked which labs are chasing that goal. DeepMind, he wrote, “appears to be the most circumspect of the big three.” Circumspect means cautious.