I'm just writing about the changes to these organizations, and their corporate governance, as reported in the press. I don't think you need to be an insider to appreciate the difference between, say, DeepMind as an independent entity pursuing AGI anyway they saw fit (RL), and now as part of Google DeepMind apparently tasked with developing SOTA LLMs. No doubt this is still a research vs pure engineering endeavor, but hard to call it blue sky when the research direction and goal is so proscribed. I personally don't believe that LLMs (or RL for that matter) are the path to AGI, but at least DeepMind used to have the flexibility to pivot and pursue whatever lines of research they felt were most promising. Do they still have that flexibility today?
Mm, care to share? I am skeptical when people make claims like this, even though it is very achievable. Many people are simply "playing house" when it comes to ML tech.
I would not believe everything you read even in the tech aligned press, it is very often false. Google Deepmind is not exclusively researching LLMs.
There is a ton of further research to be done in deep models. A lot of it will incorporate LLMs because that is currently the most powerful primitive you have. Research is a lot more closed now but I would not take that to mean research is no longer happening.