{"id":131148,"date":"2026-08-06T04:55:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T04:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/131148\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T04:55:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T04:55:13","slug":"demis-hassabis-had-reportedly-been-plotting-to-leave-his-deepmind-ceo-job-for-a-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/131148\/","title":{"rendered":"Demis Hassabis Had Reportedly Been Plotting to Leave His DeepMind CEO Job for a Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

An anonymously sourced report from Semafor<\/a> about Demis Hassabis\u2019s departure from his Google DeepMind CEO role, and his transition to a new role as chief scientist at parent company Alphabet, seems eager to clarify that he left of his own volition, and that he had apparently wanted out for a while.<\/p>\n

Alphabet announced the move as part of a wider leadership shakeup on Wednesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sources Semafor calls \u201ctwo people familiar with [Hassabis\u2019s] thinking\u201d apparently said Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, was increasingly unsatisfied with his tech executive job, and longed to be a scientist again.<\/p>\n

Semafor writes that:<\/p>\n

\u201cHis passions lie in using AI to solve scientific puzzles, like curing diseases and discovering new materials, and in ensuring that AI doesn\u2019t accidentally cause catastrophic harm to humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

To that end, the anonymous people said, this move has been in the works for at least a year, with Hassabis slowly ramping down his duties related to consumer AI at Google and the company\u2019s Gemini AI projects, and Google\u2019s chief AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu, slowly taking them on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like many of its comparably sized tech juggernauts, Google is spending money like crazy lately. While it\u2019s decidedly not one of those companies that typically fuels its day-to-day operations with investor money and promises of big profits to come, in the second quarter of this year, Google\u2019s self-reported free cash flow turned negative<\/a> for the first time since it went public in 2004.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a business we are in an incredibly strong position,\u201d Hassabis wrote in a memo on\u00a0 Wednesday<\/a>. No other company, he wrote, \u201chas the full stack.\u201d Google DeepMind, he said, \u201chas all the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hassabis will still have a role as chair of Google DeepMind, and will continue to be in charge of Alphabet\u2019s AI drug-discovery division Isomorphic Labs<\/a>. That division is deeply intertwined with AlphaFold<\/a>, the AI protein-folding program that is, essentially, the work that won Hassabis his Nobel Prize<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An anonymously sourced report from Semafor about Demis Hassabis\u2019s departure from his Google DeepMind CEO role, and his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2608,11553,5044,7718,132,7543],"class_list":["post-131148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-alphabet-inc","tag-alphafold","tag-deepmind","tag-demis-hassabis","tag-google","tag-google-deepmind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}