Google's AI leadership shuffle

• Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind schedule even as OpenAI and Anthropic have released powerful new models that significantly advance the state of the art.
• Several top researchers, including Gemini's co-lead, have left for competing AI labs.
• There's also been a groundswell of employee pushback: Multiple employees have publicly said they resigned over Google's April deal with the Pentagon that allows the military to use its technology.

In addition to Hassabis, Jeff Dean is leaving his role as chief scientist of Google DeepMind to form a new startup along with three other top Google AI colleagues, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current chief technology officer of Google DeepMind, will serve as senior VP of the unit, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai.

• A Google spokesperson said that despite being announced the same day, the two announcements were not connected.

What they're saying: Outside the company, the moves were seen as both an indictment of Google's current position and a bad omen for future efforts.

• "The magnitude of this is hard to understate," former Googler Peter J. Liu wrote in a now-deleted post on X. "The Gemini leadership left (Noam left earlier), Demis is no longer head of DeepMind. More talent will be leaving."
• "In order to be competitive today Google needs to catch up on frontier coding," Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of AI subscription service Every wrote on X. "Demis believes different fundamental research directions (like world models) are more important to his long term goal even if they're less impt competitively today."
• "Pour one out for the big G, it's so over," Core Automation cofounder (and former Google Distinguished Engineer) Rohan Anil said on X.

The other side: Google did not attribute the change in leadership to any perceived model release delays.

• Hassabis, CEO Sundar Pichai and Kavukcuoglu all released upbeat memos on the developments.

• "We've got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company," Pichai said in his memo, although he did allude to the need for Google to move faster. "We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier."
• Kavukcuoglu has been more formally involved in recent model releases than Hassabis and has also successfully navigated the company's complex internal politics, a source familiar told Axios.

Between the lines: While Google has absorbed past departures, Dean and Hassabis both have near-legendary status within Google.

• Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, was widely viewed as a person that many people felt would be a good steward for Google's ambitions as AI grows ever more powerful.
• Dean, meanwhile, has been at Google for 27 years and has been a key figure since its earliest AI efforts.
• Some DeepMind employees also see the actions as a further lessening of the once-independent unit's influence within Google, noting that Hassabis was CEO of Google DeepMind, while Kavukcuoglu is only being given the title of senior VP.

The bottom line: Google still has have lots going for it, including its own chips and cloud computing units as well as highly profitable products to help fund the massive expenditures needed to keep pace in AI.