Demis Hassabis steps down from Google DeepMind CEO role amid a major AI leadership shakeup

Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Alphabet’s chief AI architect, is taking over daily operations as senior vice president of Google DeepMind. He will report to CEO Sundar Pichai rather than holding a standalone CEO title and will oversee Gemini model development going forward.

Hassabis, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his AlphaFold work, wrote to staff that he believes AGI is close at hand and that getting the next steps right is critical for humanity. He added he’ll spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI drug discovery unit, which he has called the top application of AI for improving human health.

In his note, Hassabis touted “great progress” the company was making with new models, citing the the unreleased Gemini 4 by name. Alphabet shares fell around 5% on the news.

The reshuffle lands alongside another departure: Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and a 27-year veteran at the company. Dean is leaving to co-found a company called Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at automating machine learning, science, and engineering research. He’s joined by former Googlers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Alphabet is a founding investor in the new company and will supply cloud compute. In an interview with The New York Times, Dean said that operating outside a public company gives the team room to make calls that aren’t necessarily in the company’s purest financial interests.

In a note to staff, Pichai wrote: “After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.”

The timing comes at a difficult time for Google. Gemini 3.5 Pro, the next flagship model, is months behind its original June launch target. The company has also suffered from a string of exits from Gemini’s leadership and research ranks, including losing Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic.

In his note to staff, Pichai maintained that Google had the talent, compute, and distribution to compete.