{"id":132084,"date":"2026-08-06T20:43:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/132084\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T20:43:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:43:19","slug":"googles-gemini-leadership-team-has-left-the-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/132084\/","title":{"rendered":"Google’s Gemini leadership team has left the building"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Google'sDemis Hassabis. Ludovic Marin\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Google has\u00a0announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company.<\/p>\n

The shake-up comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which scooped up a star Google AI staffer in recent months.<\/p>\n

Shares of Google parent Alphabet fell 4% after the news.<\/p>\n

Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet chief scientist<\/p>\n

Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state of AI in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,\u201d Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate company-wide memo. \u201cIt\u2019s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can\u2019t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit\u2019s chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet\u2019s chief AI architect.<\/p>\n

Exiting stage left<\/p>\n

Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le \u2014 some of Google\u2019s most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders \u2014 left the company to launch a start-up called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The start-up is structured as a public benefit corporation.<\/p>\n

Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing.<\/p>\n

Read: Google plots E Cape as southern anchor of four-hub Africa network<\/a><\/p>\n

As Reuters detailed in a report last year, some people who have worked with Hassabis said he put scientific pursuits often ahead of making money for Google. The London-born scientist targeted a Nobel Prize as a business objective for DeepMind, three people familiar with the effort said. He worked against other efforts, insiders previously said, that could have meant new revenue for Alphabet or a better footing in the AI race. Allies inside Google rejected the notion that he was too focused on long-term science or gave short shrift to the business.<\/p>\n

Senior leaders in Google Cloud, the company\u2019s main AI revenue engine, cheered Kavukcuoglu\u2019s takeover on Wednesday as welcome news for advancing commercialisation efforts, according to a source with direct knowledge.<\/p>\n

\"GoogleGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai. Bhawika Chhabra\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Kavukcuoglu had already been more directly involved than Hassabis in collaborations between DeepMind and Cloud, and his appointment as head of the AI lab was expected to steer Gemini towards a more product-orientated direction, the source said.<\/p>\n

Hassabis will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, an Alphabet spokesman said.<\/p>\n

In his company memo, Hassabis touted the \u201cgreat progress\u201d on Google\u2019s AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4. He also said in his memo that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind, which he founded and remains CEO.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always believed the no 1 application of AI should be to improve human health<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always believed the no 1 application of AI should be to improve human health,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dean and Hassabis were considered the two leading AI figures at Google for years before the field became the center of technological innovation. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to run the lab from London after selling it to Google for around US$650-million in 2014.<\/p>\n

Dean in 2011 co-founded Google Brain, a US-based unit he led that researched AI separately from Hassabis\u2019s team. By then, he was already a revered figure inside Google known for his collaboration with Ghemawat on many of the landmark infrastructure projects that still power the company today.<\/p>\n

On the defensive<\/p>\n

In 2023, after the launch of OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organisation called Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed its CEO and Dean its chief scientist.<\/p>\n

Until recently, Dean, Vinyals and Noam Shazeer had co-led development of Gemini. Under their stewardship, Google released Gemini 3 last November which the industry widely saw as closing the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI.<\/p>\n

Read: Google launches the biggest reinvention of search in 25 years<\/a><\/p>\n

But subsequent advances from those rivals, as well as momentum for cheaper Chinese open-source models, have set Google on the defensive. At Google\u2019s annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other Google leaders touted Gemini\u2019s cost advantage, rather than its state-of-the-art capabilities.<\/p>\n

Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than \u2060two years after Google paid billions to hire him and a team of his researchers away from the start-up he led. The same week, senior research scientist John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize alongside Hassabis \u200cin 2024, said he would join Anthropic.<\/p>\n

\"Google\"<\/p>\n

Vinyals, Le and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever co-authored a 2014 research paper that became foundational to modern AI research by establishing the concept that scaling up data to \u201cpre-train\u201d AI systems would send them to new heights.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle has a deep bench of talent but losing these four individuals will leave a mark for some time. Getting innovation and execution back online is not going to be easy and losing key contributors won\u2019t make it any better,\u201d said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist for Zacks Investment Management.\u00a0 \u2014 Kenrick Cai, with Juby Babu, (c) 2026 Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Demis Hassabis. Ludovic Marin\/Reuters Google has\u00a0announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1483,53,65838,7718,65298,2408,132,7543,1430,13257,11024,16884,43412,28175,42513,157,65273,65408,65309,141],"class_list":["post-132084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-alphabet","tag-anthropic","tag-brian-mulberry","tag-demis-hassabis","tag-discovery-loop","tag-gemini","tag-google","tag-google-deepmind","tag-google-gemini","tag-ilya-sutskever","tag-isomorphic-labs","tag-jeff-dean","tag-john-jumper","tag-koray-kavukcuoglu","tag-noam-shazeer","tag-openai","tag-oriol-vinyals","tag-quoc-le","tag-sanjay-ghemawat","tag-sundar-pichai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132084","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=132084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}