SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 12 Google co-founder Sergey Brin in recent months has urged key AI staff to go all in on the company’s Gemini model as parent Alphabet seeks to close the gap with rivals, two people familiar with his remarks told Reuters.
As Anthropic raced ahead with a preview of its powerful Claude Mythos model, Brin addressed hundreds of employees in an April town hall, urging the company’s Google DeepMind AI lab to move faster, said one of the people on condition of anonymity
Google’s Gemini model briefly overtook competitors last November, but new updates from Anthropic and OpenAI once again put it in catch-up mode. By August, Google had delayed the new flagship version of Gemini by two months after internal testing showed its performance continued to lag behind rivals in areas such as coding, one of the sources and another person familiar with the matter said. On August 5, the Mountain View, California, tech giant announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its Google DeepMind AI division in which its chief, Demis Hassabis, stepped aside in favor of his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu.
Hassabis became chair, with fewer management obligations. At the same time, the two original technical co-leads of Gemini quit to co-found a startup. While some industry observers have questioned if Google is exiting the model race, interviews with seven people knowledgeable about Gemini’s development efforts show that Alphabet’s commercialization strategy and reorganization of ranks last week are tied to its effort to achieve model supremacy.