On Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Jeff Dean, Google’s 30th employee and chief scientist, is departing after 27 years to found his own AI startup. Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, who founded DeepMind more than 15 years ago, is stepping away from day-to-day control of the frontier lab to become its chairman and new chief scientist for Google parent Alphabet. Multiple former employees told Forbes the fault lines trace back to 2023, when Google fused DeepMind and Google Brain into Google DeepMind. Hassabis ran the combined division from London, while Dean remained in Silicon Valley, both reporting directly to Pichai. The center of gravity has since moved toward Mountain View, California. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the division’s former chief technology officer, moved from London to Google headquarters in the past year, and Sebastian Borgeaud, who leads a coding effort, also relocated from the UK to California. One former employee called this “the ultimate fallout of the DeepMind/Brain merger,” noting Dean’s influence had “gradually been waning.” Cultural divides between the London and Mountain View offices were also cited, with one former London-based employee describing an “America-fication” of DeepMind. Google said it was not aware of any rivalries and that the merger went very smoothly, adding it remains committed to London.