On Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made a bombshell announcement: Jeff Dean, the tech giant’s 30th employee and its chief scientist, is departing after 27 years to found his own AI startup. Meanwhile at Google DeepMind, Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, the bigwig who founded the pioneering lab DeepMind more than 15 years ago, is stepping away from day-to-day control of the frontier lab to become its chairman and new chief scientist for Google parent Alphabet.

The changes are an abrupt reset at one of the world’s most important AI labs. But the fault lines were visible well before Wednesday, multiple former employees tell Forbes. They trace back to 2023, when Google fused DeepMind and Google Brain, its two premier AI research operations, into Google DeepMind.

The pitch was simple enough: one company, one AI army, fewer internal spats as Google scrambled to catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic. The reality was messier. Hassabis ran the combined division from London. Dean remained in Silicon Valley. Both reported directly to Pichai. There might have been a single org chart. But there were still two capitals.

Now, the center of gravity has moved toward Mountain View, California, Google’s mothership. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the division’s former chief technology officer, moved from London to Google headquarters in the past year. Sebastian Borgeaud, who leads an important coding effort, also relocated from the UK to California, Bloomberg reported.

“For me, this is the ultimate fallout of the DeepMind/Brain merger,” said one former Google DeepMind employee, who worked at the company for more than a decade, adding that........

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