Google DeepMind is undergoing a major restructuring. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is giving up the title to become chairman of the unit and chief scientist of Alphabet, the company said Wednesday, formalizing a shift away from day-to-day management and toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) strategy and scientific applications of AI.
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 stand-alone 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 the “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, is leaving to cofound 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.
