I'd assume that Deep Mind, being owned by a US company and having US offices, has to care about US law, despite the differences (me: small fry; them: actually having offices there), because the chain of enforcement is still "take it or leave it" at each stage (USG->Google->DeepMind vs USG->Apple->3rd party Apple devs).
These are export restrictions, so if the model is in London (how do you determine that? The weights? The training itself?) there is no need to export it from the US. Then Google may have found gold. They can sell it to everyone that can't get the best OpenAI or Anthropic models.
Usually export controls are applied to stuff where some significant % is made in America so a few US based engineers could make the project export controllable.
Or in the case of ASML machines, any company you can pressure to comply with your policies either by restricting their access to the technology you control or politics between governments.
But do they want to start a game of chicken with Google? Doing it to Anthropic is one thing, they're much smaller and less B2C. But Google is far more powerful and likely to defend their UK/EU business because they're also fucked if they don't.
Gemni is really not that far behind, 3.1Pro was the best model or close to it when it came out, 3.5Pro likely wont be but whenever they get to 4 that could easily be Fable level, just later than when Fable itself came out.
> What’ll happen when Google Deep Mind go to release their next models, developed mostly in London?
Unless you open source it then Google Deep Mind isn't the entity "releasing" it. It's some other Google that's US based, e.g. Google Cloud running the APIs etc.
Are Google going to end up in a situation where the people working on their models cannot use the models after launch?