Google spent three years insisting two AI labs merged into one. This week it admitted they never really did.
The company has appointed Koray Kavukcuoglu, a longtime DeepMind researcher who relocated to Mountain View over the past year, to run its combined AI research and operations. At the same time, Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s co-founder and long-serving chief executive, has stepped back from day-to-day management to become chairman of Google DeepMind and Alphabet’s chief scientist, a title with more prestige than operational authority attached. Sebastian Borgeaud, who leads a key AI coding effort, also relocated from the UK to California, and several other researchers have left London entirely.
The moves effectively reverse the geography Google committed to in 2023, when it merged Google Brain, based in Mountain View, with DeepMind, rooted in London, under one Google DeepMind banner. On paper the labs became one organization. In practice, researchers kept working from separate continents, which complicated decision-making and frustrated talent on both sides, according to people familiar with the matter.
Freddy Camacho, who studies the political economy of computation, materials and energy as dominance assets, said physically relocating leadership is a more meaningful signal than any org chart change. “You can call two labs one company all you want on paper, but if the people who decide what ships are six time zones apart, decisions slow down and someone always feels like the satellite office,” he said. “Moving senior people to one building is Google admitting the merger was structural in name only.” That admission is a shift YourNewsClub grades as overdue given how much ground Google has lost while the labs were nominally combined: the company is months behind on its flagship model’s most powerful version and treated as an afterthought in AI coding tools.
The centralization follows a wave of departures thinning DeepMind’s London ranks specifically. David Silver, a distinguished DeepMind researcher, left to start Ineffable Intelligence, which raised $1.1 billion in seed funding. Simon Bouton, DeepMind’s chief experience officer and a 13-year veteran, is reportedly departing for London rival CuspAI. Both exits track researchers leaving to found startups or join Anthropic and OpenAI directly, a pull YourNewsClub hangs on compensation and relevance equally: researchers want to be at the lab defining the frontier, not managing distance from it.
Maya Renn, who studies the ethics of computation and access to power through technology, said the reshuffle raises a harder question than who reports to whom. “When a company consolidates AI leadership into one location, it’s also consolidating who gets to be in the room when consequential decisions get made,” she said. “London built real influence over Gemini’s direction. Moving authority back to California doesn’t just change an org chart, it changes whose instincts shape the next version of the model.” That consolidation is a dynamic YourNewsClub nails as easy to miss inside a story framed around urgency: centralizing power for speed and diversifying who holds it are often in tension, and Google chose speed.
Google maintains London remains a genuine hub, pointing to a newly opened office where Hassabis will stay focused on AI vision and strategy rather than operations. Co-founder Sergey Brin, a regular presence on the floor where Gemini work happens, described his relationship with Kavukcuoglu candidly at an industry event this year: he pokes and prods the team about whether work is getting done, while Kavukcuoglu organizes the groups and gets them to deliver. It’s an informal description of command structure at a company spending up to $205 billion this year on AI infrastructure, a sum Your News Club pockets as the real backdrop here: that spending demands a structure that moves fast, and Google bet fast requires one time zone, not two.
Kavukcuoglu is now the only remaining Gemini co-lead, a consolidation of authority that leaves little redundancy if his approach to running the group doesn’t work.