Google Elevates Hassabis, Names Kavukcuoglu DeepMind SVP

Jasjeet Sekhon, chief strategy officer at Google DeepMind, framed the AI industry's massive capital expenditures as a bet on recursive self-improvement (RSI), the ability of AI systems to automatically create better versions of themselves. Speaking at UC Berkeley's Agentic AI Summit, Sekhon called RSI a key part of the investment thesis. The framing signals a shift in how the industry publicly justifies unprecedented spending, with RSI emerging as the new goalpost after AGI dominated earlier discourse.

Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2, a suite of AI models designed to give robots whole-body control, dexterous manipulation, and multi-robot collaboration capabilities. The system includes three models: a vision-language-action model for motor control, an embodied reasoning model for planning and communication, and an on-device model optimized for fast adaptation to new robot bodies. Early-access partners can now deploy these models on humanoid and bi-arm robots to perform complex, multi-step tasks in unstructured environments.

Google's AI Overviews now appear in 43% of searches, marking a significant shift in how users encounter information online. The feature, which provides AI-generated answers directly in search results, has achieved rapid adoption since its introduction. This trend reflects a broader move toward AI-mediated information discovery rather than traditional link-based search results.

Google is developing a custom server chip called 'Frozen v2' that would embed its Gemini AI model architecture directly into hardware to improve inference efficiency. The chip is projected to be 6 to 10 times more efficient than Google's current homegrown AI chips when measured by tokens served per unit of power. The project addresses a critical compute capacity shortage that has strained Google Cloud's ability to serve external customers.