The "on life support" title has absolutely no justification and is just a sad editorialization with no evidence from insiders at google. They could have just as easily said "tensor chip isn't so good with tensors" and gone with a more factual headline.
The image Google has created in the market of their products is, stellar success or death. The article states and provides examples where the chips are completely missing the mark (that Apple is setting) and that the chips aren’t a stellar success, so life support is probably a group of people trying to keep the project alive.
AI goes through cycles where whichever field is currently making the most advances gets all the hype. But just because LLMs are currently flashy doesn't mean that object detection, image segmentation, facial recognition, image generation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text or anomaly detection are suddenly less useful.
