Google is making major changes to its artificial intelligence leadership team. Demis Hassabis, the current CEO of Google DeepMind, is stepping into a new role as Chairman and Chief Scientist of Alphabet.
Hassabis will keep his position leading Isomorphic Labs, Google's AI drug discovery unit. He will spend more time on long term research instead of daily operations.
Who Is Taking Over Google DeepMind
Koray Kavukcuoglu will step up to lead Google DeepMind as Senior Vice President. He currently serves as the unit's Chief Technology Officer.
Kavukcuoglu has worked at DeepMind for 13 years. He helped build the company's deep learning team and worked on early breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN.
He will now report directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. His job will include overseeing Gemini model development and the Gemini app team.
Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee, is also leaving his role. Dean spent 27 years at the company before deciding to launch something new.
Dean is starting a company called Discovery Loop. It will be an independent public benefit corporation focused on machine learning and science.
Google will invest in Discovery Loop as a founding partner. The company will also serve as a cloud provider for the new venture.
Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow, is joining Dean at Discovery Loop. DeepMind Vice President Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le are also leaving to join the effort.
Investor Reaction and Market Impact
Google's stock dropped more than 4 percent after the leadership changes were announced. The drop came after the stock had already climbed 13 percent from a low point following its last earnings report.
The changes follow a period of pressure on Google's AI division. The company has faced growing competition from other AI labs.
Sources told Axios that Google's next Gemini model has faced delays. Some pointed to low morale inside the DeepMind team as a factor.
Several senior researchers have left DeepMind in recent months. This includes one of the co-leads for the Gemini model, according to earlier Axios reporting.
In a memo to staff, Hassabis said he believes artificial general intelligence is getting closer. He said the goal is to make sure the shift benefits people broadly.
Pichai also sent a memo praising the company's AI progress. He pointed to strong demand for Gemini models and growth in the Gemini app's user base, which has passed 950 million monthly users.
Kavukcuoglu said in his own statement that DeepMind's mission has not changed. He said the team will keep working toward building AI responsibly while moving with speed.
Dean told the New York Times that leaving a public company gives him more freedom. He said decisions at Discovery Loop may not always align with pure financial interests.
Hassabis previously won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for his work on AlphaFold, a tool that predicts protein structures. That research is expected to remain a focus in his new role.
The leadership shakeup marks one of the largest changes at Google's AI division so far this year. It comes as the company works to keep pace in the fast moving AI industry.
