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

Google's AI division just got a new org chart, and the man at the top isn't really at the top anymore. Demis Hassabis, who has run DeepMind's day-to-day operations for years, is moving into the chairman seat and taking on a new role as Alphabet's chief scientist. That's a shift toward strategy and long-term AGI thinking, and away from the grind of managing a research organization.

Taking over the daily operations is Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer and Alphabet's chief AI architect. He'll hold the title of senior vice president rather than CEO, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, and he'll be the one steering Gemini model development from here on out. It's a notable demotion in title, if not necessarily in influence, and it puts Kavukcuoglu squarely in charge of Google's most important AI product line.

Hassabis, who picked up a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his AlphaFold work, told staff he thinks AGI is close and that the coming decisions matter enormously. He plans to spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's drug discovery unit, which he's described as AI's best shot at improving human health. He also mentioned progress on new models, name-checking an unreleased Gemini 4. Investors weren't thrilled with any of it — Alphabet shares dropped about 5% on the news.```}

The reshuffle isn't happening in isolation. Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and a 27-year company veteran, is also leaving, this time to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating machine learning and scientific research. He's bringing along Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — all familiar Google names. Alphabet is backing the new venture as a founding investor and will provide cloud compute, so this isn't a clean break so much as a spinout with strings attached. Dean told the New York Times that working outside a public company gives the team freedom to make calls that don't have to serve the bottom line first.

All of this lands at an awkward moment. Gemini 3.5 Pro, the next flagship model, has slipped months past its original June target. And the exit list keeps growing — Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI, Nobel laureate John Jumper went to Anthropic. Pichai, for his part, told staff Google still has the talent, compute, and distribution to compete. Whether that's confidence or damage control probably depends on how the next few launches go.