Something consequential is unfolding at the intersection of scientific ambition and corporate strategy. Google DeepMind, once the standard-bearer of frontier AI research, is losing the architects of its greatest achievements — Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals among them — as the organization that housed them quietly reorients around a different kind of power: the power to sell infrastructure rather than to discover intelligence. The departure of these figures is less a rupture than a revelation, making visible a choice that was already made: that the economics of being th