I have to admit, of the four, Karpathy and Sutskever were the two I was most impressed with. I hope he goes on to do something great.
When the next wave of new deep learning innovations sweeps the world, Microsoft eats whats left of them. They make lots of money, but don't have future unless they replace what they lost.
You could say the same about Google - and yet they missed the consequences of their own discovery and got behind instead of being leaders. So you need specific talent to pull this off even if in theory you can hire anybody.
But the reality is, LLMs are a cannibalization threat to Search. And the Search Monopoly is the core money making engine of the entire company.
Classic innovators dilemma. No fat-and-happy corporate executive would ever say yes to putting lots of resources behind something risky that might also kill the golden goose.
The only time that happens at a big established company, is when driven by some iconoclastic founder. And Google’s founders have been MIA for over a decade.