It is hard to express how much this story reads like a submarine: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Particularly, there seems nothing super newsworthy here, in terms of the fact that normally speaking, internal arrangement of a workplace office doesn't make the New York Times. But if one of the aforementioned three companies is pushing the AI buzz, dropping the names of Silicon Valley's top executives in a piece like this seems pretty much the stock way to do it.

Google in particular has revamped it's entire imagine and identity as a company around being "an AI company".

It's hard to imagine where this article originated from other than a PR firm.