Seven months ago, Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle found DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis waxing philosophical about the vastness of the universe at London’s UCL Observatory, home of the 164-year-old Fry Telescope. Her fascinating Fortune cover profile portrayed Hassabis—Nobel laureate, founder of the AI drug-design company Isomorphic, and the man steering Google’s AI efforts with Gemini—as less of a corporate executive than a scientist-philosopher.
This week, the mood at DeepMind is considerably less cosmic.
On Aug. 5, Hassabis and his boss, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, announced that Hassabis would give up his CEO title, shifting to a chairman role and leaving DeepMind’s chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu in charge. Moments later, chief scientist Jeff Dean and several other senior researchers announced their exits.
The leadership shuffle was the latest jolt in what Fortune’s Beatrice Nolan described as “one of the most damaging stretches of departures in DeepMind’s history.” For her deeply sourced look at DeepMind’s unraveling, three current DeepMind employees and one former told Nolan that delayed models, high-profile exits, and a bruising internal fight over defense contracts had left insiders wondering if Google had “lost its way in the AI race.”
In one particularly stinging line, the former employee told Nolan that Hassabis was rarely seen in the Gemini area of the London office: “Demis isn’t a very inspiring leader. Certainly not the way people talk about Dario [Amodei of Anthropic]…Demis is more of a guy who is known but not seen.” That’s a striking contrast to Hassabis’s view in January, when he spoke of fostering creativity in his staff and joked about loving to manage “high-maintenance geniuses.”
As Nolan wrote, employees see the shifts in leadership structure—Kavukcuoglu now reports straight to Pichai and does not hold a CEO title—as a pull of power from London, where Hassabis cofounded DeepMind before it was acquired, to Mountain View, where Google is headquartered.
It’s a reminder that even a man celebrated for his genius at leveraging AI for advanced pattern-recognition can struggle to read the patterns around him in the real world—burnout, talent flight, Google’s slow entry to the coding tools race. Whether DeepMind, under new leadership, can right its strategy and reclaim its edge in the AI race remains an open question.