I think the neat thing about Google is the high degree of crossfertilization between teams. In many organizations, teams rarely share information either due to

I think the neat thing about Google is the high degree of crossfertilization between teams. In many organizations, teams rarely share information either due to political reasons or a lack of sharing culture in the company as a whole. That being said, this framework/API change doesn't really surprise me; DeepMind was more a proof-of-concept than an actual battle tested framework, unlike TensorFlow. So in that sense this news isn't surprising at all.