Alphabet announced a major reorganization of its artificial intelligence division on Wednesday, with key figures Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean moving into new roles or departing the company. Demis Hassabis, formerly the CEO of Google DeepMind, will assume the newly created position of Alphabet Chief Scientist and Chair of Google DeepMind. He will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's drug discovery company. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's Chief Technology Officer, will now lead Google DeepMind as its Senior Vice President, reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
Jeff Dean, a long-serving Google engineer and former Chief Scientist, is leaving the company after 27 years. Dean, alongside other senior Google colleagues including Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, will co-found a new public benefit corporation named Discovery Loop. This new venture will focus on research breakthroughs in machine learning, science, and engineering. Alphabet has stated it will be a founding investor in Discovery Loop and will partner with it through Google Cloud.
The leadership changes come at a critical time for Google's AI development. The company faces increasing pressure from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic, with concerns raised about the pace of its Gemini model releases. Hassabis stated that his transition is driven by the perceived proximity of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI state where machines possess human-level cognitive abilities. He expressed a desire to focus more on the long-term implications and strategic direction of AGI. "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 memo to staff.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai described Hassabis's new role as a step up, allowing him to dedicate his full attention to shaping the future of AGI. Pichai also noted that Google is making progress on new models, including an unreleased version called Gemini 4.
Jeff Dean, who co-founded Google Brain in 2011, has been instrumental in developing many of Google's core infrastructure projects and AI systems, including early search infrastructure and foundational machine learning platforms like TensorFlow. His departure, along with other key researchers, has been viewed as a significant development for Google's internal AI capabilities.
Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient in chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, co-founded DeepMind in 2010 before its acquisition by Google in 2014. The merger of DeepMind and Google Brain in 2023, following the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, created the unified Google DeepMind entity, with Hassabis as CEO and Dean as Chief Scientist.
In his new capacity as Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Hassabis will advise model development and research teams, and continue working with Pichai on global AGI strategy. Kavukcuoglu, in his new leadership role, will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. He has been with DeepMind for over 13 years, contributing to breakthroughs such as WaveNet and Deep Q-Networks.
The announcement led to a 4% drop in Alphabet's stock on Wednesday. This restructuring follows recent departures of other prominent AI researchers from Google to competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI.