On Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made a bombshell announcement: Jeff Dean, the tech giant’s 30th employee and its chief scientist, is departing after 27 years to found his own AI startup. Meanwhile at Google DeepMind, Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, the bigwig who founded the pioneering lab DeepMind more than 15 years ago, is stepping away from day-to-day control of the frontier lab to become its chairman and new chief scientist for Google parent Alphabet.
The changes are an abrupt reset at one of the world’s most important AI labs. But the fault lines were visible well before Wednesday, multiple former employees tell Forbes. They trace back to 2023, when Google fused DeepMind and Google Brain, its two premier AI research operations, into Google DeepMind.
The pitch was simple enough: one company, one AI army, fewer internal spats as Google scrambled to catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic. The reality was messier. Hassabis ran the combined division from London. Dean remained in Silicon Valley. Both reported directly to Pichai. There might have been a single org chart. But there were still two capitals.
Now, the center of gravity has moved toward Mountain View, California, Google’s mothership. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the division’s former chief technology officer, moved from London to Google headquarters in the past year. Sebastian Borgeaud, who leads an important coding effort, also relocated from the UK to California, Bloomberg reported.
“For me, this is the ultimate fallout of the DeepMind/Brain merger,” said one former Google DeepMind employee, who worked at the company for more than a decade, adding that Dean’s influence inside Google had “gradually been waning” since the merger, as power shifted to Hassabis and then later to Kavukcuoglu and Borgeaud.
Some of the cacophony also stemmed from cultural divides between the team’s London office, where DeepMind was founded, and its Mountain View office. Or as one former longtime employee based in London called it: the “America-fication” of DeepMind. “It’s just how people work in the states,” that person said. “It’s the loudest person in the room. Everybody seems to claim the project is theirs — they’re leading it now. There’s just a sharper edge.”
Google said it was not aware of any rivalries between employees in the two cities, and the merger went very smoothly. It also said it remains committed to London, where it opened a new office earlier this year, and described Google DeepMind as a “global team with a global footprint.”
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Disagreements sometimes came from how different the cultures between DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014, and Google Brain had been historically set up, former employees said. For example, in some cases, London-based DeepMind researchers could see projects and documents from researchers based in Mountain View, but not the other way around, said two former employees. “All of this caused a lot of mistrust,” one of them said. If there was overlap in projects from teams in both offices, sometimes particular teams were favored depending on where they were based. “Things are quite politicized based on who you report to,” the former employee continued. “There’s some animosity between the two teams.”
Employees in each office would also compete over one of the most precious resources in AI: compute, a former employee said. (Shortly before the June departure of Noem Shazeer, a key company researcher in Mountain View, computing resources dedicated to one of his projects was reportedly reassigned to a London-based team at Google DeepMind.)
With leadership across two continents, decision-making became sluggish, said Ben Pouladian, an analyst that covers AI infrastructure who posted on X Wednesday about the internal competition at Google between Brain, DeepMind and its other divisions. “They’re not able to make decisions,” he told Forbes. “There’s a lot of bureaucracy slowing things down.”
Wednesday’s shakeup comes as Google has had a turbulent tenure in generative AI. It had a massive head start in artificial intelligence — the company’s Google Brain researchers invented the transformer in 2017, the architecture that makes gen AI possible. But it squandered that lead as OpenAI captured the world’s attention with ChatGPT, and all eight authors of the transformer paper, including lead researcher Shazeer, departed for other endeavors (though Shazeer would rejoin the company in 2025 after Google essentially acqui-hired him back for $2.7 billion). As a result, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who had been long absent from day-to-day operations, came back into the fold, and the company consolidated its two research arms into Google DeepMind.
The company seemed to find its footing late last year when its Gemini 3 model performed well on benchmarks. But more recently, the company had suffered brutal departures: In June, John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize alongside Hassabis for their work on DeepMind’s Alphafold program for predicting biomolecular structures, joined Anthropic. Two days earlier, Shazeer announced he was leaving yet again to work for OpenAI. The high-profile losses left many wondering what was going on behind the scenes.
Now Hassabis is stepping out of day-to-day leadership at Google DeepMind and will focus more on Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinout focused on AI biotechnology and drug discovery, which he’s led since 2021. Meanwhile, Dean, along with three other top AI researchers at Google, are leaving after founding Discover Loop, a startup focused on using AI to supercharge the speed of scientific research, backed by lead investors Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, as well as Google. Succeeding Hassabis at Google DeepMind is Kavukcuoglu, a Turkish-born engineer who studied under AI pioneer Yann LeCun at New York University. An ascendant star at Google, the company made him its chief AI architect last summer.
Kavukcuoglu also seems to embody the worlds of both London and Mountain View: A lieutenant of Hassabis, he joined DeepMind in London two years after its founding, before moving to Mountain View. He’s also particularly adept at navigating a large organization, with lots of employees and big personalities; he’s reportedly Brin’s go-to person when he needs something done at Google DeepMind. Even before the handoff, he’d already taken charge. A Google executive told Forbes: “Koray was already running probably the majority of DeepMind for quite some time.”
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