GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
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In the AI industry, Google prides itself on seeming like the adult in the room: quiet, stable, time-tested. On Wednesday, even as the company announced its largest AI org shakeup yet, Google and its leaders presented a unified front, keeping their messaging focused on how the changes tee up future success.
But the reality is that the laundry list of executive changes likely signal deeper issues within Google’s AI organization. That starts with its tenuous position in the AI race, and it stretches to problems like Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis’ interest in longer-term research over shorter-term product shipping, as well as bubbling political opposition from top employees like DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.
A current Google employee, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said one of the changes — Dean’s departure — is an example of “the vestiges of Google’s idealism” fully dying out. “Losing Jeff continues the brain drain at Google,” they said. “Mediocrity is the likely result.”
Wednesday’s news rocked the AI industry, which is difficult to do during an era when AI researchers are constantly switching between roles and labs like a game of musical chairs. Google announced that Demis Hassabis is stepping away from DeepMind’s day-to-day operations to focus on AGI and research; Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s current CTO, will step up to lead DeepMind in Hassabis’ place. At the same time, Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and the company’s 30th employee, will leave the organization alongside three top Google AI researchers to form a new AI startup.
“Losing Jeff continues the brain drain at Google. Mediocrity is the likely result.”
Google is widely viewed as being the most successful of the established tech giants in the AI race, far surpassing progress by Meta, Amazon, and Apple. But Google is still viewed as slower-moving than OpenAI and Anthropic, and it certainly hasn’t lapped them in frontier models. Both Hassabis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made that point in their statements.
“We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve,” Pichai wrote, adding, “We have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here.” Hassabis wrote that the company is entering a “next chapter” and that it has “all the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will.”
Key figures in the AI industry seemed to view the changes as Hassabis stepping to the side in favor of a faster-moving, product-focused push at GDM.
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