Google co-founder Sergey Brin in recent months has urged key AI staff to go all in on the company’s Gemini model as parent Alphabet seeks to close the gap with rivals, two people familiar with his remarks told Reuters.
What Is New
Hassabis became chair, with fewer management obligations. Four sources characterised its laggard status as a result of lingering structural challenges that made it fall behind in the first place. On August 5, the Mountain View, California, tech giant announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its Google DeepMind AI division in which its chief, Demis Hassabis, stepped aside in favour of his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. The Google shakeup comes as Brin has worked to fire up staff, something he also did after OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch in 2022 jolted Google. the 52-year-old Brin has been informally influencing model training efforts Although he no longer holds an executive title. Though Google caught up to the frontier last November with the release of Gemini 3, it quickly fell behind again.
The Google leaders said day-to-day work at the lab would remain the same, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. Kavukcuoglu would stay in charge of Gemini, the sources said; he had assumed oversight of model development more than a year prior, five sources said. For several months now, he has been remarking to key staff that they need to catch up to the frontier, according to one of the sources knowledgeable about his efforts. Constraints in computing capacity, for instance, and disagreements between Gemini’s many project leaders led to fewer resources for areas that would prove critical, such as coding, two of the sources said. Google’s bureaucratic nature also caused it to release models at a slower pace than nimbler rivals, the four sources said. Some London-based leaders found their influence on Gemini’s technical direction had diminished in the wake of Hassabis decreasing his involvement in Gemini and Kavukcuoglu moving to Google’s headquarters, according to a source with direct knowledge.
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Google declined to make Brin available for an interview.
