At the unit-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday of last week, Hassabis and Kavukcuoglu sought to assuage concerns by staff — most of whom learned about the change as it became public — about the AI lab's future.
The Google leaders said day-to-day work at the lab would remain the same, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. Kavukcuoglu would stay in charge of Gemini, the sources said; he had assumed oversight of model development more than a year prior, five sources said.
Hassabis gave a talk about how AI could advance science and alter society, long-term issues that would constitute the focus of his new role as chair, the three sources knowledgeable about the meeting said.
This messaging aside, the all-hands meeting surfaced fresh concerns that DeepMind’s autonomy was being subsumed by Google. Hassabis and Kavukcuoglu told staff that several nontechnical teams were being moved out of DeepMind and into the corporate reporting structure, two of the sources said.
Senior leaders in the cloud division, meanwhile, expect Kavukcuoglu’s appointment to alleviate tensions with DeepMind over allocation of Google’s constrained supply of AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), another source said.
Brin has used the implicit power he holds as Google’s co-founder to push resource allocation toward specific areas, such as recursive self-improvement, the point at which the technology can improve without human intervention, this source said.
Hassabis, meanwhile, decreased his involvement in managing Gemini and passed off that responsibility to his deputies shortly after originally getting the AI model off the ground in 2023, two of the sources said.
Though Google caught up to the frontier last November with the release of Gemini 3, it quickly fell behind again. Four sources characterized its laggard status as a result of lingering structural challenges that made it fall behind in the first place.
Constraints in computing capacity, for instance, and disagreements between Gemini’s many project leaders led to fewer resources for areas that would prove critical, such as coding, two of the sources said. Google’s bureaucratic nature also caused it to release models at a slower pace than nimbler rivals, the four sources said.
He now will have final say on major decisions for DeepMind, a Google spokesperson told Reuters last week.
Some of the highest-profile leaders other than Kavukcuoglu, including Gemini's original technical co-leads Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, left as part of last week’s shakeup. Staff reporting to some of these leaders had held a rare degree of agency to conduct research not directly related to training Gemini, three sources said.
In the wake of their departures, Google did not immediately share plans for the fate of those teams or those projects, making some anxious that the lab’s bulwark against commercial interests would further erode.
