Bea Nolan here, filling in for Allie. Google DeepMind has been having a difficult year.
Last week, longtime Google DeepMind CEO and company cofounder Demis Hassabis announced he was stepping back from the CEO role and into a new chair role.
Hassabis ceded day-to-day control to DeepMind’s chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu—who now reports straight to Sundar Pichai, rather than holding a standalone DeepMind chief title. Just minutes later, news broke that chief scientist Jeff Dean was leaving too.
The high-profile exits appeared to be just the tip of the iceberg in DeepMind’s tough year.
Gemini 3.5 Pro, unveiled with fanfare at I/O in May, has now blown through three release dates. Independent benchmarking company Artificial Analysis also told Fortune that Google’s best shipped model, Gemini 3.6 Flash, currently trails Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and at least one Chinese lab on raw intelligence—a reversal from the brief (but memorable) stretch last year when Google actually topped the AI leaderboard.
