Alphabet’s AI division is undergoing a major leadership transformation.
Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who led Google DeepMind, will step back from day-to-day operations to become its chairman and take on the additional role of Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He will also continue leading Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug-discovery spinoff. “I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote in a staff memo released August 5, explaining his desire for more strategic focus.
Taking over the operational helm is Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind’s CTO and Google’s chief AI architect. He will serve as senior vice president of the unit, reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and will oversee the development of the Gemini model, frontier research, and app and developer teams. Kavukcuoglu’s 13-year tenure at DeepMind includes breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN.
In a parallel departure, 27-year Google veteran Jeff Dean is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at accelerating discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. Dean is joined by Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le, and DeepMind VP Oriol Vinyals. Google will be a founding investor and cloud provider, while the startup has also secured funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. Dean noted that the new structure frees him from quarterly financial pressures, allowing decisions that prioritize scientific progress.
The announcements come at a tense time: Gemini 3.5 Pro is running months behind schedule, and several senior researchers had already departed for rivals. Alphabet shares fell over 4.10% on the news, erasing part of a recent 13% rally. The Gemini app, however, boasts more than 950 million monthly users, according to Pichai’s memo.
