Google DeepMind CEO and cofounder Demis Hassabis stepped down from the top role to become chairman, while CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu now reports directly to Sundar Pichai. The simultaneous departure of chief scientist Jeff Dean has compounded the turmoil at the London-based subsidiary. Gemini 3.5 Pro has seen its release dates pushed back three times, and Gemini 3.6 Flash now ranks behind models from Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and at least one Chinese lab. A wave of key departures hit in June, including Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer (to OpenAI) and AlphaFold co-inventor John Jumper (to Anthropic), signaling retention challenges against better-funded rivals.
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