Gemini has entered wartime management! Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US) has centralized its AI command chain in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, as its $205 billion AI gamble enters the payoff stage.

American tech giant Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US) is consolidating the leadership of its artificial intelligence business unit at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, to gain stronger momentum in the rapidly accelerating competition for AI large models and agents against Anthropic and OpenAI, vying for the most dominant frontier technologies in artificial intelligence globally. This move by Alphabet Inc. Class C comes amid market concerns that the departure of "AI elder" Jeff Dean, along with senior employees Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, will weaken the continuity of updates for Alphabet Inc. Class C's flagship AI technology, Gemini, leading to a drop of over 4% in Alphabet Inc. Class C's stock price on Wednesday. The tech giant appointed Koray Kavukcuoglu, who relocated to Mountain View over the past year, to lead its vast AI research and operations system, highlighting Alphabet Inc. Class C's urgent need to streamline decision-making and centralize daily AI operations in Mountain View as it faces delays in model releases, talent attrition, and competitive pressure from OpenAI and Anthropic. Meanwhile, DeepMind co-founder and long-time CEO Demis Hassabis has stepped back from day-to-day operations to become the chairman of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet. Sebastian Borgeaud, who is responsible for a key AI programming project, has also moved from the UK to California. Additionally, some employees have completely left the company's London headquarters. The effort to centralize AI leadership at Alphabet Inc. Class C aims to reverse a trend that has plagued the company since at least 2023. That year, Alphabet Inc. Class C merged two originally independent and highly valued scientific labs: Google Brain, based at the companys headquarters in Mountain View, and DeepMind, rooted in London. Although the two labs merged under the name Google DeepMind, researchers continued to work on different continents. According to insider sources, this arrangement complicated the decision-making process and left talent in both locations feeling dissatisfied. As Kavukcuoglu formally takes over Alphabet Inc. Class C's AI ambitions, the company is notably lagging behind its competitors in the AI application race. Its flagship AI models strongest version has fallen months behind schedule; in the AI programming automation marketone of the earliest applications to achieve significant commercial valuemany believe Alphabet Inc. Class C's products are more like late additions. Researcher dissatisfaction with Alphabet Inc. Class C's competitive position has heightened, sparking a wave of departures for new venturesamong them is legendary engineer Jeff Deanand recently, talent has been switching to Anthropic and OpenAI. These competitors not only place talent at the forefront of AI technology but also offer substantial wealth opportunities from their impending IPOs. Meanwhile, Alphabet Inc. Class C has pledged to invest as much as $205 billion in capital expenditure this year alone to support its AI ambitions, putting Kavukcuoglu under immense pressure to deliver results quickly. Some of those who have left include senior staff from DeepMind's London office. David Silver, a prominent researcher from that office, left earlier this year to found a new AI startup called Ineffable Intelligence, which secured $1.1 billion in seed funding. An insider has revealed that DeepMind's Chief Experience Officer Simon Bouton also plans to leave to join the London-based startup CuspAI. Bouton, who has been at the company for 13 years and was responsible for overseeing operational staff, did not respond immediately to media requests for comment. Alphabet Inc. Class C stated that London remains a vital hub for the companys AI talent and strategic ambitions. The company recently opened a new office building in London, where Hassabis will continue to focus on AI vision and strategy. These adjustments in the past year mean that many key AI leaders driving the development of the Gemini model have now congregated in one location. Gemini is at the core of Alphabet Inc. Class C's AI strategy. Since the onset of the AI boom, Alphabet Inc. Class C CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin have frequently appeared on a floor dedicated to Gemini employees, but according to an internal employee, Hassabis has rarely been seen there. Over time, oversight of Gemini in Silicon Valley has gradually shifted to Kavukcuoglu. The new arrangement is also reflected in Brin's description of his role in Alphabet Inc. Class C's AI work. In June of this year, at an event for AI researchers and industry leaders, Brin was asked about how he shares responsibilities with Kavukcuoglu and Hassabis. Brin remarked that he is deeply involved in the Gemini project and closely collaborates with Kavukcuoglu. Brin stated, "I would say I nudge him and the team from time to time, like asking, Hey, are you really doing that? Sometimes there can indeed be a bit of interference; I don't deny it. But Koray is really responsible for organizing the various teams and ensuring they deliver perfect results." As a long-time leader at DeepMind, Kavukcuoglu built the deep learning team and pioneered significant research breakthroughs within the company. He has generally maintained a lower profile compared to Hassabis but has quietly gained prominence within DeepMind's leadership in recent years. Last summer, Kavukcuoglu was promoted to Chief AI Architect at Alphabet Inc. Class C. Yann LeCun, a deep learning pioneer, served as Kavukcuoglus mentor during his doctoral studies at New York University. LeCun praised him as "an outstanding engineer" and noted that he developed excellent research management skills during his rise through DeepMinds ranks. LeCun also remarked that Kavukcuoglu's early research helped convince people that AI could fundamentally change how machines process language. Now, as Alphabet Inc. Class C grapples with the fallout from the departures of several prominent AI leaders, he faces an extremely challenging task. Kavukcuoglu is currently the only remaining senior co-head of Gemini within the company. Alphabet Inc. Class C is rapidly centralizing its AI command chain to compete in the AI programming agent and enterprise AI markets. The primary focus of Alphabet Inc. Class C's future business strategy is to transform the previously dispersed "research federation" from Londons DeepMind and Californias Google Brain traditional systems into a machine directly delivering Gemini products, centered in Mountain View and reporting directly to Pichai. With Kavukcuoglu overseeing both Google DeepMind's daily operations and serving as Chief AI Architect, this means that pre-training, post-training, evaluation, computational resource scheduling, and synergy with Cloud, Search, and developer products will fall under a shorter decision-making chain. Hassabis, meanwhile, will take on the role of chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet, focusing on AGI strategy, societal impact, and Isomorphic Labs. These latest personnel adjustments are not meant to weaken fundamental research, but rather to manage "long-term scientific exploration" and "quarterly product delivery" separately, attempting to resolve the slow decision-making and commercialization of research outcomes that have plagued the cross-continental teams since the merger in 2023. The second strategic priority is to concentrate resources on addressing shortcomings in cutting-edge models, AI programming, and agent execution capabilities, and to upgrade Gemini from a single chat model into a foundational operating system across Googles entire stack. The launch of Gemini 3.5 Pro has been delayed by several months due to programming capabilities not meeting internal targets, indicating that Alphabet Inc. Class C's most pressing issue is not merely to continue stacking generalized benchmark scores but to enhance code generation, complex tool invocation, long-term task planning, and enterprise-level reliability. At the same time, the company has initiated large-scale pre-training for Gemini 4 and is developing developer and enterprise scenarios through the Antigravity agent development platform, CodeMender safety proxy, and Flash low-cost models. Alphabet Inc. Class C's real business goal in AI is to embed the same model capabilities into Alphabet Inc. Class C's search engine, advertising, Workspace, Android, Google Cloud, and Vertex AI simultaneously, enabling a single investment in model development to generate returns across billions of consumer and enterprise customers, rather than allowing OpenAI and Anthropic to define high-value AI applications first. The third focus is on transforming unprecedented AI capital expenditures into enterprise AI cloud computing revenue, search increments, and verifiable capital returns. Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company, Alphabet, has raised its capital expenditure guidance for 2026 to between $195 billion and $205 billion, with second-quarter capital expenditures reaching $44.9 billion and resulting in $5.9 billion in free cash flow outflows. However, Google Cloud revenue from cloud computing businesses also surged 82% year-over-year to $24.8 billion, with backlog orders hitting $514 billion and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 companies using Gemini Enterprise. Model API processing reached approximately 22 billion tokens per minute. This highlights that Alphabet Inc. Class C's future growth path is not simply about "focusing on large models," but also about reconstructing its growth trajectory around a vertically integrated path of "self-developed TPU and high-performance network infrastructureGemini large modelscloud computing enterprise platformGoogle search engine and advertising commercializationWaymo and AI pharmaceuticals." For investors, the organizational centralization raises the execution ceiling, but the ongoing loss of core talent amplifies the risks of single-point decision-making and innovation gaps. Therefore, the investment verification metrics surrounding Alphabet Inc. Class C will no longer focus solely on model leaderboard standings but instead on whether the timeline for Gemini's release can accelerate, whether programming and agent market share can increase, whether Cloud backlog orders can convert to cloud computing revenue, whether AI + search engines can maintain advertising monetization, and whether substantial capital expenditures can be transformed back into positive free cash flow.