Reuters reports that Google’s AI division has faced significant turmoil in recent months. Co-founder Sergey Brin returned to oversee model training directly, taking informal control of development priorities (including pushing for recursive self-improvement) which delayed the next generation of Gemini by two months. Demis Hassabis was demoted to chairman with reduced management duties, replaced by Mustafa Kavukcuoglu who now reports directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai under Brin’s support and serves as a bridge between DeepMind and Google Cloud. The original Gemini technical co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals left to found an AI startup focused on scientific discovery, raising concerns among staff about loss of autonomy. These changes reflect ongoing erosion of DeepMind’s independence since its 2014 acquisition by Google. The news caused Google’s stock price to drop 4% on release, with ongoing issues such as limited computing resources and leadership conflicts casting doubt over the future of Google AI.