One of Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin, has set up a rapid response headquarters in Mountain View, gathering key company engineers around him. His goal is to break internal bureaucracy, speed up work on the flagship Gemini model, and return Google to the forefront in the AI race against OpenAI.

This is happening amid major personnel changes. Demis Hassabis, who led Google DeepMind, has moved to the position of Chief Scientist at Alphabet, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking his place. After 27 years, Jeff Dean has left the company; Brin personally shut down his project to integrate the model into chips.

The Google co-founder isn’t limiting himself to an administrative role—he’s deeply involved in Gemini’s technical development, participating in discussions about model sizes, release timelines, and code architecture. For AI training, he suggested implementing software to track Google programmers’ work in real time. Brin also made it clear to employees that a 60-hour workweek is the optimal threshold for high productivity. He describes his management style as “provocative”: breaking established processes and pushing teams forward. He has previously stated that “60 hours a week is the golden mean of productivity.”

Brin’s strategic focus is on general AI and algorithms with recursive self-improvement, where the neural network refines itself. He is responding to market demand, which expects the next version of Gemini to be a breakthrough. Google engineers, in turn, believe that only someone of his caliber can restore the company’s leadership.

At the same time, Google plans to invest in the startup Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le.