There is a desk in Mountain View where Google's AI future is now being decided, and the man who sits beside it has spent the better part of a decade pretending he did not want the job. Sergey Brin, the co-founder who drifted away from day-to-day operations long before anyone outside Google could tell you his title, is back. Not on a billboard, not at a keynote. At a desk, next to the person now running the company's most important product.
That person is Koray Kavukcuoglu, the new senior vice president of Google DeepMind, who moved from London to Google's headquarters last year and now leads Gemini development from a workstation a few feet from Brin. The seating chart, in other words, tells the whole story: control of Google's AI effort is leaving London and coming home to Silicon Valley.
The reshuffle, confirmed this week and described by a dozen current and former employees to the Financial Times, is a sweeping reordering of AI leadership at a company worth $4.4 trillion. It is also the clearest sign yet that Google's research-first culture, the one Demis Hassabis built and defended for more than a decade, is being pushed aside by commercial urgency.
The founder steps back
Hassabis, who sold DeepMind to Google for £400 million in 2014 and later collected a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, is stepping back from running the lab he founded. He becomes chief scientist of Alphabet and chair of Google DeepMind, a role that lets him chase long-term research questions without carrying the business on his back. The transition was planned for months, according to people familiar with the reorganisation.
For years, Hassabis was the "AI engine room of Google," the figurehead who absorbed Google Brain in 2023 and turned the combined unit into the home of Gemini. But behind the scenes, Brin had been steering decisions on AI development without holding any formal executive title. Over the past year, Hassabis also divided his attention between DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery company he founded, while becoming one of the industry's loudest public voices on artificial general intelligence.
Science wins trophies, not revenue
The tension at the heart of the change is a familiar one. Hassabis is admired for scientific leadership, but several people familiar with Google's thinking said executives had grown frustrated with what they saw as his lesser focus on the commercial demands of the AI business. The decision to make AlphaFold freely available, a move that earned him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, reportedly became a source of internal tension: a landmark scientific gift that generated little direct commercial return despite the scale of its investment.
A person close to the company disputed the framing, noting Hassabis had led the initial launch of Gemini and remained invested in its success. But the direction of travel is hard to argue with. Google enjoyed a resurgence last year on the strength of its Gemini 3 models and the viral Nano Banana image tool, yet executives and board members remain worried about a weaker position in coding models and enterprise AI, where Anthropic and OpenAI have an early lead.
Here is what changes on paper:
- Hassabis becomes Alphabet chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind, focused on long-term research and AGI strategy.
- Kavukcuoglu takes day-to-day control of the lab and Gemini development from a desk beside Brin in Mountain View.
- Brin, without a formal executive role, solidifies his position as the most influential voice on AI strategy.
- Control of the AI effort shifts decisively from London to Silicon Valley.
The office politics were softened in public. "We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier," chief executive Sundar Pichai said. Yann LeCun, who made a similar retreat from management at Meta in 2018, saw the logic in Hassabis's move: "You just want to focus on activities for which you have unique abilities."
Shockwaves in London
Inside the London lab, the reaction was more visceral. Several current and former DeepMind employees said the reorganisation had sent shockwaves through the building, with some fearing it marked the end of the research culture Hassabis had long protected. One former DeepMind executive at a rival company said they had already received calls from multiple staff members ready to jump ship.
The departures are not hypothetical. Jeff Dean, the 27-year veteran and one of the most respected scientists in the field, announced he was leaving this week to found Discovery Loop with three colleagues, backed by Google itself. Alphabet shares fell about 5 percent after the announcements, a reminder that investors now treat talent and leadership structure as balance-sheet items.
For Hassabis, the outcome may be closer to a release than a demotion. A friend described it as "a great outcome for Demis," one that lets him keep influence without relocating to the US and frees him to pour time into Isomorphic Labs. In his message to staff, Hassabis said he was stepping back to focus on the "big picture" and on steering the development of AGI, which he said "is close at hand."
What to watch in the coming months:
- Whether Kavukcuoglu can ship Gemini products fast enough to close the coding and enterprise gap with OpenAI and Anthropic.
- How many more senior researchers follow Dean out the door.
- Whether Brin's return accelerates commercialization or reignites the research-versus-revenue friction that made this reshuffle necessary in the first place.
The story of Google's AI era used to start in a London office where scientists were told to think big and worry about money later. It now starts at a desk in California, next to a co-founder who came back to make sure the thinking turns into products. The science is still there. It just has a new supervisor.
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