Last Week in Tech – Google Reshuffles Its AI Empire, Washington Writes a Rulebook It Won't Show You, and Memory Sold Out to 2030
Tech Talks With Kinsoft by Steven Kinnas
Episode notes
Your Monday roundup of the technology and security news that matters to Australian businesses, covering 3-9 August 2026.
In this episode:
Google's AI leadership shake-up (5 Aug). Demis Hassabis moves to Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of Google DeepMind reporting to Sundar Pichai, taking Gemini research and product. Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years to co-found a public benefit corporation with Sanjay Ghemawat, with Google as founding investor and cloud partner. The Gemini app is past 950 million monthly users; Gemma is past 900 million downloads.
Washington's unpublished frontier-AI framework (4 Aug). Under Executive Order 14409, an NSA-led group has built a process for up to 30 days of pre-release government access to frontier models - and reportedly wi ...