By Shirin Ghaffary and Mark Bergen, Bloomberg
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is losing some of its most prominent AI veterans in a seismic overhaul that is casting doubt over leadership of a critical area of growth right as competition intensifies. Alphabet shares fell as much as 5.5% on the news.
Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, is moving to a chairman role at the lab. Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee central to the development of its AI strategy, is meanwhile departing the company to launch a startup, taking several high-profile employees with him.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s Chief AI Architect and a longtime Hassabis deputy, will be taking over many of Hassabis’s responsibilities as senior vice president and report to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the company announced on Wednesday in a blog post.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, a pioneering artificial intelligence research lab that sold to Google in 2014. He has since become a leading figure in the development of AI technology.
“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,” Hassabis said in a statement.
Shares of Alphabet were trading at $362.31 at 12:08 p.m. in New York.
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