Google Bureaucracy Drives Away AI Talent as DeepMind Chief Steps Back

Rigid culture hits AI business

DeepMind CEO Hassabis also steps down

"Even changing a single line of code requires setting up a risk-prevention process. After wading through endless procedures, employees have become rats trapped in a maze."

That is how former Google principal engineer Pravin Seshadri described the company when he left. The criticism, made three years ago, still applies today, the report said.

Google, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a garage in 1998, has grown into a Big Tech leader. It now has 68 subsidiaries, 754 executives and 200,000 employees. As the company has ballooned into a corporate giant, AI talent has been walking out the door.

David Silver, who led reinforcement learning research, left Google DeepMind late last year. He was followed by Denny Zhou, head of DeepMind's reasoning team, and Noam Shazeer, Gemini's co-technical lead. Then on Aug. 6, DeepMind Vice President John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, often referred to as a genius developer, also departed. On Aug. 7, Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis relinquished oversight of AI operations and moved into a chairman role. The departures have raised questions about the profitability of Google's AI business.

Google has expanded beyond search into in-house semiconductors, cloud computing, video and AI models, while acquiring 264 companies to date. The strategy was aimed at building vertical integration and securing new growth engines. But as the organization grew too large, business units drifted toward competition and infighting instead of collaboration. DeepMind, which develops Gemini, has complained that Google's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, are being allocated more heavily to external sales.

That bureaucracy has made the organization more rigid and has hampered the research environment. Former Google DeepMind Vice President Oriol Vinyals wrote on Aug. 5 that radical change inside a large organization requires overcoming substantial inertia.

As AI talent has left, Google's AI business, a key future growth driver, has also taken a hit. Gemini 3.5, which had been slated for release in June, has yet to launch. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have been rolling out improved models every week. Shares of Alphabet, Google's parent, fell 5% in each of the two sessions after Dean's departure.

Kim In-yeop, Silicon Valley correspondent, Korea Economic Daily, inside@hankyung.com