Google DeepMind founder and chief executive Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day leadership of the AI lab he created, taking on the role of chair as part of a major shake-up at the top of the company. Hassabis will also become chief scientist of parent company Alphabet, according to the announcement made on Wednesday.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently Google DeepMind's chief technology officer and a former lieutenant to Hassabis, will take over the lab's daily operations as senior vice president of Google DeepMind. In his new position, Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, while Hassabis will serve as both chair of DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet, a structure that signals the London-based group will be subsumed further into Google's broader business.
The leadership overhaul extends beyond Hassabis's transition. Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran who most recently served as DeepMind's chief scientist, is leaving the company alongside several colleagues to launch a public-benefit corporation called Discovery Loop, a startup that Google will back.
Dean, who was Google employee number 30 and helped design the systems that made Google search a global information indexing powerhouse, is joined in the departure by key AI researchers Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals, and Sanjay Ghemawat. Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly tried hard to keep the group, especially Dean and Ghemawat, from leaving.
The departures continue a string of high-profile personnel moves at Google this summer, including Noam Shazeer, the previous vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini. Around the same time, Google DeepMind VP John Jumper announced he was leaving for Anthropic.
Some employees were reassigned while others left, according to Engadget.
In his memo to staff announcing the decision, Hassabis leaned on the promise of artificial general intelligence, writing that he has worked toward AGI his whole life and believes it is close at hand. He told staff he was stepping back from day-to-day management to focus on the "big picture" and influence the direction of increasingly powerful AGI, saying it is critical that the next steps go well for humanity.
Google is framing the reorganization as a way to speed up its AI work while giving Hassabis more time to focus on AGI.
Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his AlphaFold work, and DeepMind's research has resulted in a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The market reaction was immediate, with Google's stock falling 5 percent on the announcement, reflecting investor uncertainty about the scope of the leadership changes at one of the industry's most important AI operations.
