AI Earthquake at Google: DeepMind CEO Out, Chief Scientist Launches his Own Startup
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 6 sources
Demis Hassabis is stepping back as DeepMind CEO, and Jeff Dean is leaving Google entirely to start his own company. This is the biggest shake-up at Google's AI arm in years, and Wall Street didn't love it either.
Google just rearranged the top of its AI org chart, and the market noticed immediately, knocking roughly 4 to 5 percent off the stock after a strong post-earnings run. Demis Hassabis, who founded DeepMind and has been its public face for over a decade, is handing off day-to-day control to become chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly the unit's CTO, steps in as operational lead, a senior vice president now reporting straight to Sundar Pichai.
But the bigger jolt might be Jeff Dean's exit. A 27-year Google veteran and one of the most respected engineers in the company's history, Dean is leaving to launch Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation that Google itself will back financially and support with cloud infrastructure. He's not going alone. Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — heavyweights spanning Google Brain's founding generation through DeepMind's more recent research — are reportedly joining him. Dean told the New York Times the appeal is freedom: working outside a public company lets him chase scientific questions that don't necessarily need to pencil out financially.
The Financial Times frames this less as a rupture and more as paperwork catching up to reality. Biographer Sebastian Mallaby argues Hassabis has effectively been operating as an AI statesman for a while now, while Kavukcuoglu was already running the lab in practice. That statesman framing lines up with what Hassabis reportedly told staff: that AGI feels close, that this is a pivotal moment, and that he wants space to think about the bigger picture — including how AI gets regulated — rather than manage quarterly roadmaps.
Still, the timing says something. Google has been scrambling to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, especially on AI coding tools, an area where it's been visibly behind. It stood up an internal "Code Strike" team for exactly that reason, reorganized its Nobel-winning research group, and funneled talent toward Gemini. Researchers like David Silver and John Jumper had already departed DeepMind before this. Axios also reports genuine unrest inside the ranks — low morale, a co-lead on Gemini bolting for a rival, and a delayed rollout of Gemini 3.5 Pro. Pichai's memo talked up Google's talent and compute advantages and urged people to move faster. Kavukcuoglu insisted the mission hasn't changed. Whether restructuring the org chart actually fixes morale, or just moves the furniture, is the part nobody's memo can answer yet.
Hassabis isn't disappearing, for what it's worth. He keeps running Isomorphic Labs, DeepMind's drug-discovery spinoff, building on the Nobel Prize he shared with Jumper for AlphaFold's protein-structure work in 2024.
My take
Watch Discovery Loop closely, not DeepMind's new org chart. When four of your most senior AI researchers leave a company that pays them extraordinarily well to found something outside its P&L, that's usually a signal about where they think the interesting work — and the leverage — actually sits, and Google backing it with cash and cloud credits looks a lot like hedging a bet it can't fully control anymore.
Read more about this at: Trending Topics
