Brin pushed Google AI staff to ‘go all in’ on Gemini, Reuters reports

Alphabet ↘ 0.18% announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its Google DeepMind AI division on August 5, with co-founder and longtime CEO Demis Hassabis stepping back from day-to-day operations in favor of his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. The restructuring, driven by mounting competitive pressure and internal frustrations, marks a turning point for one of the world's most prominent AI laboratories.

Brin's Push and Gemini's Struggles

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been urging key AI staff for months to "go all in" on the company's Gemini model, according to a Reuters exclusive report published today. In an April town hall, Brin addressed hundreds of employees as Anthropic raced ahead with its Claude Mythos model, pressing DeepMind to move faster.reuters

Google's Gemini briefly overtook competitors last November with the release of Gemini 3, but new updates from Anthropic and OpenAI put the company back in catch-up mode. By August, Google had delayed the flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro by two months after internal testing showed it continued to lag behind rivals in areas such as coding.synbiobeta+2

Kavukcuoglu, who joined DeepMind in 2012 before the Google acquisition, now serves as Senior Vice President reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. He will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app. Hassabis assumes the title of Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, focusing on long-term AGI strategy.cnbc+1

Departures and Eroding Autonomy

The shakeup extended beyond Hassabis. Jeff Dean, who spent 27 years at Google, departed alongside three other senior leaders to co-found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation backed by Alphabet as a founding investor. The two original technical co-leads of Gemini also quit to start their own venture.reuters+1

At a unit-wide all-hands meeting on August 6, Hassabis and Kavukcuoglu told staff that several non-technical teams were being moved out of DeepMind and into corporate Google's reporting structure. The consolidation represents a further erosion of the autonomy DeepMind retained since Google acquired the London-based lab in 2014.reuters

The Path Forward

Analysts say Kavukcuoglu's appointment signals a pivot from research breadth toward competitive execution. "This feels like a move designed to adjust the focus away from academic projects and more toward improving frontier performance," Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC.cnbc

Google fell behind because "its focus was much more on monetizable areas such as Search, and it lost out on the first clear killer use case, which is coding," Malik Ahmed Khan of Morningstar told CNBC. Alphabet's stock dropped roughly 4% the day of the announcement, though it has recovered ground since.reuters+1

Brin, who holds no executive title, has used his influence to push resources toward recursive self-improvement — the point at which AI can improve without human intervention. The message to DeepMind staff is clear: reclaim model supremacy, or watch rivals define the future of AI.reuters