The news: DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of the Google AI lab to become its chairman as part of a leadership overhaul announced by the parent Alphabet.
Nobel prize-winning Hassabis also takes the newly created title of Alphabet chief scientist.
Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and the group’s chief scientist, is leaving to found a startup called Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that Google will invest in and supply with cloud computing. Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice-president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le are going with him.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Alphabet’s chief AI architect, assumes day-to-day responsibilities as senior vice-president, reporting to Sundar Pichai.
The numbers: Alphabet shares fell more than 5% to USD355.16 in New York.
What they said: “I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis said in a memo to staff.
“I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.”
The context: Alphabet gave no details on what prompted the moves.
But it comes as Google has continued to trail OpenAI and Anthropic. Two of its best-known AI researchers left for those rivals in June. Noam Shazeer went to OpenAI less than two years after Google paid billions of dollars to hire him and his team, and senior research scientist John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize with Hassabis, joined Anthropic the same week.
The flagship version of Google’s latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch.