[dragonwriter]

Is it “Google” or a single permission-to-fail R&D team at Google headed by the creator of Swift that focussed on languages with features like those of Swift and ultimately settled on Swift?

Because Google is fairly well known for being a “decide as late as possible, often after multiple competing options from different teams are in place and being used in real signifcant applications” organization.

[nexus7]

It's certainly the latter. There's a small research team at Google evaluating whether Swift is a good candidate to replace Python as the de-facto language for ML. That's all there is to it.