One of HNs failure-modes is inaccuracies get voted to the top if they seem correct to the majority of voters whose biases resonate with poster's.

Aside: thank you for asking. When I previously encountered incorrect top-level comments that I knew to be wrong (insider information), I'd simply ignore and move on. You've inspired me to push back more often.

You worked there and didn't know of any of the intra-company autonomy infighting that leaked into the news? [0] [1]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-res...

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...

Good managers insulate reports from the politics, if you weren’t plugged into it it’s either your manager did a good job or it’s the only part of Google that isn’t 90% politics.

Signed, “didn’t work at brain or dm but was involved in a lot of alphabet level decision making”.

This reads pretty normal for big tech corporate politics.