All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Saturday, August 8, 2026
David Friedberg suggests that Google's strategic shift towards AI infrastructure and data centers, rather than pure model development, is a key factor driving top AI talent like Jeff Dean to seek opportunities in startups. He highlights that infrastructure offers a more predictable return on investment compared to the high-beta nature of frontier model development.
“And I think that the scientists that we're seeing transition out are the scientists that have been at the core of model development, of making these frontier models.”
“So if you're one of the great computer scientists, you're Demis, you're Jeff Dean, you're this whole crew, and you're inside at Google, and they're allocating capital not to your models, not to the things that you're most interested in, but they're allocating capital to infrastructure and data centers and supporting the broad ecosystem of models.”
“You start to say, well, given the fact that I can go down the road and visit Brad Gershner and a couple of other people and raise a couple billion dollars with a PowerPoint deck because I'm the greatest in the world at doing this, that might be a better path for me.”