Google DeepMind is splitting its top leadership roles in a shake-up that sends co-founder Demis Hassabis into a chairman and chief-scientist role and sees longtime Google chief scientist Jeff Dean depart the company after 27 years to launch an independent AI research venture.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced the changes Wednesday in a post on the company's official blog titled "The next chapter of our AI momentum." Hassabis steps down as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become chairman of the division and chief scientist of Alphabet, a shift meant to let him focus on long-term artificial general intelligence strategy while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI-driven drug-discovery unit.
A new operating chief
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer for 13 years and a figure credited with helping build early breakthroughs including WaveNet and DQN, becomes senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai rather than holding a standalone CEO title. He will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams — effectively taking over day-to-day operations of the division Hassabis has run since co-founding it in 2010.
"It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it," Pichai wrote of Hassabis's new focus. Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, the protein-structure prediction system, and has increasingly positioned himself as a public voice on AGI timelines and safety even as DeepMind's product organization has grown.
Dean's departure
Separately, Jeff Dean — Google employee No. 30, who joined in 1999 and went on to co-found Google Brain in 2011 and help build foundational systems including MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, TensorFlow and Google's custom TPU chips — is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation. His co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow; Oriol Vinyals, a former DeepMind vice president; and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder.
Discovery Loop aims to automate scientific and engineering discovery, starting with machine-learning research itself before expanding into hardware design, drug discovery and clean energy. Its seed round was co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Google participating as a founding investor and agreeing to serve as the new venture's cloud provider; the round's valuation was not disclosed.
Operating outside a public company gives the team room to make calls that aren't necessarily in the company's purest financial interests.
Jeff Dean, co-founder, Discovery Loop
Alphabet shares fell roughly 4% to 5% following the announcement, as investors weighed the departure of two of the company's most recognizable technical leaders in the same week. The reshuffle comes at a pivotal moment for Google's AI ambitions, with Gemini competing directly against OpenAI and Anthropic for enterprise and consumer market share, and it raises questions about how much of DeepMind's original research culture will persist under a more centralized reporting structure focused on shipping Gemini products.
The moves also feed into a broader narrative of senior AI talent striking out on their own, following a wave of departures from major labs over the past two years as researchers who helped build today's large language models seek more autonomy — and, in some cases, equity — outside Big Tech's biggest AI divisions. Whether Discovery Loop can replicate the kind of foundational breakthroughs Dean helped deliver at Google, this time without the backing of a trillion-dollar balance sheet, is likely to be one of the more closely watched experiments in the industry over the next several years.
