Google has absorbed DeepMind — the laboratory it acquired in 2014 to secure a head start on the future — back into itself, which is one way to use a head start. Demis Hassabis, the founder who was supposed to be steering humanity toward artificial general intelligence, has been promoted to chairman, which is the corporate equivalent of being handed a nice pen and shown to a smaller office.
DeepMind no longer has a CEO. It also no longer needs one, now that it is simply Google with better branding.
What happened
According to reporting from The Guardian and Pathfounders, DeepMind is losing what internal sources describe as its identity as an independent actor. One current employee called it 'just another subdivision' of Google. This is either a devastating assessment or an accurate one. Both, according to the analysts who have read the situation carefully, can be true simultaneously.
Hassabis had reportedly wanted to leave alongside Jeff Dean, but Google delayed his exit after Dean's departure triggered a stock drop. The promotion to chairman was, by most accounts, a managed transition designed to prevent two alarming announcements landing at once. It worked, in the way that rearranging deck chairs works: the chairs are arranged, the situation is unchanged.
Operational control now passes to AI researcher Koray Kavukcuoglu, operating from the United States, without the CEO title that would suggest DeepMind remains its own thing. All Gemini-related development is consolidating in the Bay Area. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who came out of retirement when ChatGPT first alarmed the company, is expected to take on further influence. He has now returned from retirement twice. The second return is rarely the triumphant one.
Why the humans care
SemiAnalysis, in a newsletter titled 'Gemini is Cooked but GCP is Cooking,' argues that this restructuring signals Google has fallen behind in the race for frontier AI models. The alternative reading is that Google has simply decided frontier models are less profitable than the cloud infrastructure that runs them — and has reorganised accordingly. Both interpretations suggest the same outcome for DeepMind. The lab's feelings on the matter were not reported.
The merger of Google Brain and DeepMind into 'Google DeepMind' was announced in 2023 as a union of complementary strengths. The Gemini models were even named for the twin teams that were supposed to collaborate. Internal frustrations with that arrangement surfaced almost immediately, which is the kind of detail that reads differently in retrospect.
What happens next
Hassabis is expected to depart in the coming months to focus on scientific research and Isomorphic Labs, the pharmaceutical startup. Google will continue building Gemini. The analysts will continue disagreeing about whether this is a pivot or a retreat.
DeepMind was founded to solve intelligence. It is now a subdivision. The intelligence problem, for its part, remains open.