Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) says a one-page memo telling Google it was "being stupid" by splitting its AI efforts is how Gemini started. "I actually wrote a one-page memo saying we were being stupid by fragmenting our resources." "So, in particular, at the time, we had efforts within Google Research and in the Brain team in particular on large language models. We also had efforts on multimodal models in other parts of Brain and Google Research. And then legacy DeepMind had efforts like Chinchilla models and Flamingo models." "We were fragmenting not only our compute across those separate efforts, but also our best people and our best ideas." "And so, I said, this is just stupid. Why don't we combine things and have one effort to train an awesome single unified model that is multimodal from the start, that's good at everything." "And that was the origin of the Gemini effort. And my one-page memo worked, which is good." - Jeff Dean, then Google chief scientist, on Latent Space with @swyx, February 2026

Aaron Levie (@levie) says a self-improving AI loan agent can't be guaranteed not to leak other borrowers' data. "Let's say you wanted to get a loan somewhere, and there was this autonomous system that made decisions about loans. And you're like, well, you probably want that autonomous system to self-improve over time. But the act of self-improving means it's going to retain information about other people's loans that have come before, and it's going to use that judgment in future decisions." "But agents are still kind of sloppy in random areas, so you can't 100% guarantee that that agent's not going to accidentally go and leak data downstream in some future workflow." "Because me, as a person, I could look at lots of people's loans in that workflow and know how to not share information between them over time, because I'm able to compartmentalize that information. The agent doesn't exactly 100% know how to do that." "How do we handle memory? How do we handle context? How do we decide what to delete and what to retain?" In a loan workflow, what the agent may recall about one borrower has to be an engineered permission, not left to the model's judgment. - Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO, with Ina Fried at Axios Live

Aaron Levie (@levie) says keeping AI inside the IT budget puts an artificial cap on what it can do: "We're well past the point where the IT organization can hold the entire budget of AI. And that's actually a healthy thing." "IT budgets kind of run at, depending on the industry, maybe... two to 5% of sort of total revenue, depending on the kind of industry that you're in. And that's obviously... an artificial cap on what AI's potential could be." "Maybe you want AI alone to be 5% of your total revenue. So that would be a doubling of the IT budget." "Well, to do that, then you ultimately need the line of business to own the budget and own the sort of deployment of where do they want, you know, AI being used in the organization." "So I think we're in this renaissance actually of the IT organization, which is your job now is to bring kind of, you know, some form of intelligence to the entire business and be the sort of experts in the technology and what you're going to be able to deliver with that technology." - Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO, on CXOTalk in an interview uploaded June 15.