Sunday, October 25, 2026

Back to today

From X

@convequity

Convequity on X

Jeff Dean’s departure is a seminal moment for $GOOG I’ve been watching this closely and the picture keeps getting clearer — and more concerning. Google is still treated as the safe consensus AI bet. Full-stack ecosystem, consumer reach, TPU muscle. But the competitive status of its frontier models looks increasingly dubious. The one-way talent flow tells the story. Google has seen massive outflows to OpenAI and Anthropic (reports put the numbers in the high hundreds to over a thousand in recent periods) while inbound from those labs remains tiny. This is not normal churn. It signals a structural talent problem that shows no sign of being fixed anytime soon. Jeff Dean leaving with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, while Demis Hassabis steps back from day-to-day leadership, is the clearest signal yet that the research edge has peaked. Top talent does not want to waste cycles inside a large, conservative organization when the progress window is this narrow. We’ve flagged Google’s cultural and leadership issues in our recent rebalancing work. This just cross-validates it hard. What’s especially striking is the internal dynamic. All signs point to Koray Kavukcuoglu having been central to the environment that produced these outcomes — yet he has now risen to Chief AI Architect and the unchallenged operational AI leader, reporting directly to Pichai. The research org is fraying rapidly while the executive who oversaw much of that period moves up the ranks. That is a strange incentive structure. Large orgs struggle to deliver breakthrough AI. Talent density, bold vision and nimble execution matter more than scale. Meta rebuilt around an independent lab. SpaceX is doing the same with xAI. Google may eventually follow, but the current setup still seems unwilling to fully accept the reality. That said, the TPU and infra side continues to execute well with far less leakage. The competitive edge is shifting toward infrastructure, chips and consumer distribution — not frontier model leadership. This remains the biggest news of the week for a reason.

Tower Semiconductor Deep Dive

Tower Semiconductor’s low-loss photonics chips halve lasers in 1.6T optical modules, supporting a $680 million annualized photonics run…

Deep Dive: $ASML

ASML’s €230 million EUV machines underpin advanced AI chip production, with demand booked through 2028 after nearly $9 billion and two…

Margin Call

Petrobras’s Morpho-1 well revived hopes that Brazil’s Equatorial Margin can become a major new oil frontier after hydrocarbons were…

Our Views on CoreWeave

CoreWeave's financial statements point to a business model familiar to the authors after a closer review of the AI infrastructure company.

DLTR · long

Dollar Tree INC

Dollar Tree is long after divesting Family Dollar, separating its stronger banner from its weaker business.

Capital Wars

CoreWeave’s $35 billion to $39 billion 2026 spending plan relies on debt as unsecured yields reach 15%, making its GPU cloud expansion a…

Publications we follow

Every publication on this site, hand-picked.

129 publications

Newsletters 109

X accounts we follow

Every account on this site, hand-picked.

91 accounts

Investor letters we follow

190 firms

Sectors

Ordered by how often our editor reaches for them.