Google co-founder Sergey Brin will again take the helm of artificial intelligence (AI) development and commercialization. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, who has led AI development, will move to oversee long-term research and step back from the front lines of management.
On the 7th (local time), the Financial Times (FT) cited multiple sources to say Google has overhauled its AI leadership to speed up Gemini monetization and narrow the gap with competitors such as OpenAI. Brin, who emphasizes productization and commercialization, has moved to the forefront of Google's AI business in place of Hassabis, who had a strong research-oriented bent.
Hassabis recently handed management of the AI research company he founded, DeepMind, to Senior Vice President Koray Kavukcuoglu and took the chair role at DeepMind. At the same time, he was appointed chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company, to oversee long-term AI research strategy. Brin will take practical command over research and development (R&D) and productization.
Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page, laid the groundwork for Google's AI strategy by backing the launch in 2011 of Google's first AI research organization, "Google Brain," and leading the 2014 acquisition of the U.K. AI startup DeepMind. Brin stepped back from the front lines in 2023 when Hassabis took charge of Google AI research and development, but as a sense of crisis grew that Google was falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic, he quickly emerged as the next AI leader.
Although Google unveiled the high-performance AI model "Gemini 3" last November under Hassabis' leadership, it has not posted clear results in enterprise AI services and coding agent markets that have become core revenue sources for the AI industry. FT said this has heightened concerns among executives and the board about profitability relative to AI investment.
Sources also said there is an assessment that Hassabis was relatively passive on commercialization issues. A representative example is the protein-structure prediction AI "AlphaFold." Hassabis released it for free so the scientific community could use it freely, but inside Google, criticism reportedly arose that despite massive research and development investment, it had not produced business results.
Amid this atmosphere, analysis says Brin's influence has grown further. Although he has been away from day-to-day operations in recent years, he has consistently been involved in major AI strategy decisions as a director on Alphabet's board, and is being viewed as the right person to lead the organization immediately.
Still, the tasks before Brin are not easy. He must prove uncertain profitability despite massive AI infrastructure investment and also stem the outflow of key AI talent. The leadership reshuffle began with the departure of Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, known as Google's "legendary researcher." After news of Dean's exit broke, Alphabet's share price fell about 5%.
FT also reported interpretations that the reshuffle is the result of a clash between the research-centric culture of London-based DeepMind and the business-centric strategy of the Silicon Valley headquarters. According to former and current DeepMind insiders, the organizational mood has been shaken significantly since the leadership change. As concerns grow that the research-first culture Hassabis protected could disappear, some employees are reportedly already preparing to leave.
Hassabis will focus on long-term research and academic roles, such as setting directions for artificial general intelligence (AGI) research. He jointly won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing AlphaFold and revolutionizing protein-structure research, and he will continue to serve as CEO of Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that uses AlphaFold technology.