Google Bureaucracy Drives Out AI Talent, Hurting DeepMind

Rigid culture weighs on AI business

DeepMind CEO Hassabis also steps back

“Even changing a single line of code requires setting up a risk-control process. After wading through countless procedures, employees have become like rats trapped in a maze.” That was how former Google senior engineer Pravin Seshadri described the company when he left. He made the remark three years ago to criticize Google’s bureaucratic culture, and little has changed, according to people familiar with the company.

Google, which Larry Page and Sergey Brin started in a garage in 1998, grew into a Big Tech leader. It now has 68 subsidiaries, 754 executives and about 200,000 employees. As the company has turned into a sprawling giant, AI talent has been leaving.

David Silver, who led reinforcement learning research, left Google DeepMind late last year. He was followed by Denny Zhou, the leader of DeepMind’s reasoning team, and Noam Shazeer, Gemini’s co-technical lead. On Aug. 6, John Jumper, a DeepMind vice president and Nobel chemistry laureate, and Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist known as a star developer, also left. A day later, on Aug. 7, Demis Hassabis gave up oversight of Google’s AI operations and moved into the chairman’s role at Google DeepMind. The departures have fueled criticism that Google’s AI business lacks profitability.

Google has expanded from search into in-house chips, cloud computing, video and AI models, and has acquired 264 companies to date. The strategy was meant to build vertical integration and secure new growth engines. But as the organization grew too large, business units increasingly chose competition and conflict over collaboration. DeepMind, for example, has complained that Google is allocating more of its Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, to outside sales.

That kind of bureaucracy makes the organization more rigid and impedes research. Former Google DeepMind Vice President Oriol Vinyals wrote on Aug. 5 that “to achieve radical change in a large organization, you have to overcome significant inertia.”

The departures have also hurt Google’s AI business, a key future growth driver. Gemini 3.5, which had been scheduled for release in June, still has not launched. In the meantime, 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, Hankyung.com, inside@hankyung.com