Google builds elite team to close the coding gap with Anthropic

Brin pushes for self-improving AI

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Deepmind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu are directly involved in the effort. "To win the final sprint, we must urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution and turn our models into primary developers" of code, Brin wrote in an internal memo. He also required every Gemini engineer to use internal agents for complex, multi-step tasks.

Brin told employees that stronger coding skills are a stepping stone toward AI that can improve itself. A sophisticated coding agent, paired with AI that handles math problems and experiments, could eventually automate much of the work done by AI researchers and engineers.

Internally, Google tracks how much its coding tool "Jetski" gets used and ranks teams accordingly, a setup similar to Meta, which tracks token usage as its metric. Some teams outside Deepmind also require engineers to attend AI training sessions.

According to The Information's sources, Google is leaning more heavily on models trained on its internal code. Google's internal codebase looks very different from the public code typically used to train general-purpose coding agents, so these internally trained models can't be released publicly. They could, however, help Google build better models that eventually ship to users, while also speeding up internal development.