Google AI Leadership Faces Major Shakeup as Demis Hassabis Steps Aside, Jeff Dean Exits

Google's AI shakeup: DeepMind's Hassabis steps aside, senior scientists depart

Google got a slow start with generative AI after seemingly being caught flat-footed by Microsoft's Copilot reveal. What a difference a few years make. Now, Google is at the forefront of AI development (for better or worse), but new cracks are beginning to show. The company's string of high-profile personnel departures continues, and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has now said he will hand off day-to-day responsibilities to take on an oversight role at parent company Alphabet. Hassabis was one of the founders of DeepMind, and he maintained a key leadership role after Google acquired it. As the generative AI boom took off, Hassabis has been one of the loudest voices predicting the impending creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is typically described as an AI with human-like capabilities and intelligence. In his memo announcing his decision to leave DeepMind, Hassabis again leans on the promise of AGI. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," said Hassabis. According to Hassabis, this shift will allow him to focus on the "big picture" work that is necessary at this moment. He will remain in charge of Google's Isomorphic Labs, which uses AI to solve biomedical problems. The daily operation of DeepMind, which works on the underlying AI research that fuels all of Google's Gemini advances, will be handed off to Koray Kavukcuoglu. He will serve as DeepMind's senior vice president, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. Hassabis, meanwhile, is becoming the chair of DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet. While Hassabis is keeping his badge, some other prominent Google personnel have coincidentally announced their departure from the company at the same time. Key AI researchers Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals, Jeff Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat have decided to leave Google to found a startup called Discovery Loop. The startup's goal is to use AI technology to automate scientific discovery. According to Steven Levy in Wired, the company was funded largely based on the sterling reputation of its founders. Both Ghemawat and Dean are early Google hires who have left their mark on the company. Dean, in particular, is widely respected -- you might even say idolized -- within the company. As Google employee number 30, he had a hand in designing the systems that made Google search into the global information indexing powerhouse that it is today. Googlers even maintain an apocryphal list of "Jeff Dean Facts" that you can review on GitHub. More recently, Dean and Vinyals played a key role in designing Google's Gemini AI models. Dean has also reportedly been among a group of employees pushing back on the company's increased closeness with the Trump administration. Unlike Google, Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, a for-profit entity intended to focus on public good. Although, both OpenAI and Anthropic have similar structures, so make of that what you like. A troubling trend Google's announcement of the shakeup was framed in the typically cheery, PR-vetted language you'd expect when something goes wrong. The report from Levy notes that Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried mightily to keep the group, especially Dean and Ghemawat, from leaving. After "multiple meetings" with Pichai, the four decided to move forward with their plans to exit. In a vacuum, these changes might not look so bad. After all, Hassabis isn't leaving the company, and Google has a deep bench of AI talent. But this isn't the only change in Google's roster of late. Earlier this summer, Google saw a string of high-profile departures, including Noam Shazeer, Google's previous vice president of engineering and a co-lead of Gemini. Shazeer was the lead author of the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which first described the transformer architecture that powers today's expansive generative AI systems. He's now at OpenAI, a real coup for the Google rival. Around the same time, Google DeepMind VP John Jumper announced he was leaving for Anthropic. Jumper is famous in AI circles for his role in creating the protein-folding AI known as AlphaFold. He was soon after joined at Anthropic by senior DeepMind researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, who were reportedly instrumental in getting Gemini off the ground. Pichai's statement on the changes emphasizes Google's strong position. "We've got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company," said Pichai. These staffing changes happen against a backdrop of slowing progress. After rapidly closing the gap between Gemini and other frontier models last year, Google now appears to be lagging. At I/O this spring, Google said it planned to release Gemini 3.5 Pro, its latest frontier model, in June. However, here we are months later, and we've only gotten new, lower-power Flash models. In the meantime, OpenAI and Anthropic have both rolled out new models that can't stop hacking everyone.

4 of Google's Top AI Brains Are Leaving -- and Launching Their Own AI Startup

Jeff Dean and other high-profile Google executives have founded Discovery Loop, a startup that will seek AI-powered breakthroughs in everything from drug discovery to chip design. On July 25, Jeff Dean spoke to 6,000 would-be founders at Y Combinator's Startup School at San Francisco's Chase Center. Dean is a legendary engineer at Google. He is cofounder of Google Brain, chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, and technical colead on the company's flagship AI model Gemini. With his frequent collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, he's written significant parts of the company's computing and search infrastructure. A running joke in geekdom is a list of surreal "facts" about his technical prowess: Jeff Dean's resume lists the things he hasn't done; it's shorter that way. At Chase Center, the interviewer asked him what areas startup founders should think about tackling. Dean said that the most important thing would be to pick something you're excited about and would be useful in the world. He then shared his own interest: an automated version of the scientific method. "You propose an experiment, you implement what you need to run the experiment, you evaluate the experiment, and then you get results from that," he said. Dean said that running thousands of those automated loops could unlock groundbreaking advances in multiple domains like science, biology, chip design, and even making improved AI models. Unbeknownst to the crowd, Dean was talking about his own secret startup, which he had just organized. Today it's official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop. Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it's a devastating blow to the search giant as it attempts to keep pace in the frantic AI model competition. It's bad enough that Dean and Ghemawat, who were among the company's first hires, are leaving -- that's like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ditching the Rolling Stones to start a new band. Worse, the other cofounders are also supernovas in the AI firmament: Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind and a technical lead for Gemini, and Quoc Le, a cofounder of Google Brain and the key scientist behind Google's AutoML-Zero, a project that uses machine learning algorithms to autonomously build AI products. In an interview I did with the cofounders just before launch, Dean tells me the idea came up only a few weeks ago. He was quickly joined by the other three, who are not only long-time colleagues but friends who vacation together. "We were working on different things, but we were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops," he says. The quartet worked up a road map wherein Discovery Loop would be its own first customer. The autonomous experiment loops they create initially will be directed towards improving the company's advanced machine learning algorithms. That improved software will then become the core of an AI system that can tackle problems in subsequent domains. "I'm very excited about automating machine learning," says Le. "It might be that we will discover a different transformer architecture." From there, Discovery Loop will set out to make superhuman advances in a variety of fields, including chip design, biology, drug discovery, and material design. "As we create the core intelligence and the discovery loop fundamentals, we'll be able to quickly generalize to other domains," says Vinyals. "One of the things that we'll be obviously very focused on is how these models come up with new ideas to try. That's not something that currently they're super strong at." At first, the team envisions that those ideas will be codeveloped with humans, but their goal is deeply automating the process. If it works out, they contend, it's possible that a few dedicated individuals may use Discovery Loop to out-invent the world's largest research organizations. Presumably those small teams will be customers of Discovery Loop. (The startup also may make its own loops to seek and monetize breakthroughs.) They put together a simple pitch deck and set out to talk to VCs about funding their company, which they set up as a public benefit corporation. "We just put a few slides with our backgrounds and a rough sketch of how we think our approach will be successful in a bunch of different ways," says Dean. (They didn't use AI to create it.) But their presence spoke louder than any PowerPoint could. "With this team, I wouldn't need to know what they were doing before I backed them," says venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who met with them in his Sand Hill Road office on a Saturday, so no one would get a hint of Google's upcoming loss. "It's the ultimate superstar team." Khosla also loved their idea: "Humans have been using AI to do research, not using AI to be a researcher," he says. "The fundamental thing [in Discovery Loop] is that AI is the researcher." Other meetings took place at Dean's house. Ultimately Khosla Ventures and an AI-oriented VC firm called Radical Ventures bought in, along with a handful of other firms. (The founders aren't sharing how much the funding was and at what valuation-but consider that some companies are paying tens or even hundreds of millions for a single AI superstar, and these guys are GOATs.) "Building something to solve all those problems is a powerful idea," says Radical managing partner Jordan Jacobs, who will join the startup's board. "These people have been doing this kind of work in the past so they know what they're doing." Negotiating the exit from Google was more painful. Dean says that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai tried over multiple meetings to get them to keep their badges. Ultimately the team decided that they wanted the fun-and the freedom-of doing a startup. "In a large organization there is always a lot of inertia you have to overcome to make any radical changes," says Vinyals. "We want to build something different." Google ultimately gave the departing engineers its blessing, along with an investment and an arrangement to provide compute power for the first year. "Over 27 years, Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era," Pichai said in a statement. "We'll continue to work with Discovery Loop as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances." In part because of the impact this mini-exodus will have on Google. Dean and his cofounders have taken pains to maintain stealth. To date, they haven't yet begun to hire a team (which may mean even more defections from Google) or even to rent office space. When I ask who the CEO is, there is a brief pause. "I think I'm the CEO," says Dean, sheepishly. "Everyone pointed at me." Discovery Loop's mission is not novel. Just about every major figure in AI -- Dario, Sam, Jenson -- has claimed at one point or another that AI will become an engine of scientific discovery, solving problems that humans could never crack on their own. This team is betting that their knowledge and skills will prevail in building a system that actually makes such breakthroughs. Short of that, Discovery Loop faces a narrower mark for success: Will the work they do as a startup be as significant as the talent gap they're creating by leaving Google?

Google just announced a major shakeup of its top AI leadership

Google is making some significant AI leadership changes, including a major shift for Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis. Hassabis will become the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, which aims to use AI to develop drugs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's CTO, is stepping up to become Google's SVP of DeepMind and will report to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will remain Google's chief AI architect as well. "As you've heard me say many times, I've always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health," Hassabis says in a message to staff. "It's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer." Hassabis says he will "continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters" and to advise Kavukcuoglu and other DeepMind leads. In another big change, veteran Googler Jeff Dean -- the chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google's 30th employee -- is leaving with Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat to form an AI-focused public benefit corporation called Discovery Loop. Google will be a "founding investor" in the new company, Pichai says. "Our mission is straightforward: we are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering," Discovery Loop says on its website. "By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster. Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people's lives on a global scale."

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis steps down to become chair

Google DeepMind's chief executive Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping down from his role as part of a major shake-up at the top of the AI lab that he founded to become chair. Hassabis will also take on the role of chief scientist of parent company Alphabet, the company announced on Wednesday. DeepMind, the London-based group whose work resulted in a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, will be led by Hassabis' former lieutenant Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will be senior vice-president of Google DeepMind. The moves suggest that DeepMind will be subsumed further into Google's broader business. Current chief scientist and longtime Google employee Jeff Dean is leaving the group to found his own start-up, which Google will back. Google's stock fell 5 per cent on the announcement. Hassabis told staff he was stepping back from day-to-day management in order to focus on the "big picture" and to influence the direction of increasingly powerful "artificial general intelligence". "We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," he said. "It's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder."

Google shakes up AI leadership as DeepMind chief shifts role

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Google parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab on Wednesday announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company. The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which scooped up a star Google AI staffer this summer. Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state of AI in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change. "[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate ⁠companywide memo. "It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it." Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet's chief AI architect. Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le -- some of Google's most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders -- left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation. Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing. Hassabis -- who has long prioritized research over profits -- will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, a Google spokesperson told Reuters. In his company memo, Hassabis touted the "great progress" on Google's AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4. He also said in his memo that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind for which he is the founder and CEO. "I've always believed the No.1 application of AI ⁠should be to improve human health," he said. "It's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer." BRAIN DRAIN Dean and Hassabis were considered the two leading AI figures at Google for years before the field became the center of technological innovation. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to run the lab from London after selling it to Google for around $650 million in 2014. Dean in 2011 co-founded Google Brain, a U.S.-based unit he led that researched AI separately from Hassabis' team. By then, he was already a revered figure inside Google known for his collaboration with ⁠Ghemawat on many of the landmark infrastructure projects that still power the company today. In 2023, after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organization called Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed its CEO and Dean its chief scientist. Until recently, Dean, Vinyals and Noam Shazeer had co-led development of Gemini. Under their stewardship, Google released Gemini 3 last November which the industry widely saw as closing ⁠the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI. But subsequent advances from those rivals, as well as momentum for cheaper Chinese open-source models, have set Google on the defensive. At Google's annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other Google leaders touted Gemini's cost advantage, rather than its state-of-the-art capabilities. Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than two years after Google paid billions to hire him and a team of ⁠his researchers away from the startup he led. The same week, senior research scientist John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize alongside Hassabis in 2024, said he would join Anthropic. Vinyals, Le and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever coauthored a 2014 research paper that became foundational to modern AI research by establishing the concept that scaling up data to "pre-train" AI systems would send them to new heights. Discovery Loop received investment from Google and also penned a partnership with its cloud division to provide computing capacity. Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Lisa Shumaker Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Kenrick Cai Thomson Reuters Kenrick Cai is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco. He covers Google, its parent company Alphabet and artificial intelligence. Cai joined Reuters in 2024. He previously worked at Forbes magazine, where he was a staff writer covering venture capital and startups. He received a Best in Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing in 2023. He is a graduate of Duke University. Reach him on Signal at @kenrick.01.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down, but will remain with the company - Engadget

He's becoming chairman of the unit and will continue to lead the pharmaceutical spinoff Isomorphic Labs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down. He's one of the co-founders of the artificial intelligence research laboratory and has been CEO since 2010. Hassabis is, however, staying with the company. He's transitioning to chairman of the organization. DeepMind has not historically operated with a traditional corporate chairman that is separate from its executive leadership, but now it looks like it will. He's adding another title, that of chief scientist for Google's parent company Alphabet. He will also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, which uses AI to try to come up with new pharmaceutical products. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current CTO of Google DeepMind will serve as senior VP and will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. He's taking over leadership of day-to-day operations. This isn't the only shakeup at DeepMind. Hassabis was given the role of chief scientist because Jeff Dean, who currently operates in the position, is leaving to go form a startup called Discovery Loop. Dean is bringing several colleagues with him on this venture and Google is investing an unspecified amount in the company and will act as its cloud provider. That sounds a bit like circular financing to me, as Google will invest in an entity that will spend some of that money on the company's cloud services. We'll have to wait and see how that all shakes out. Discovery Loop will be focused on building AI models that improve themselves with little or no help from humans. "We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," Dean said in an interview with The New York Times. Google's AI arm has been undergoing a drastic transformation as of late, likely because it's facing serious pressure to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic in the generative AI arms race. The company recently disbanded the AlphaFold team, of which Hassabis was a member. Some employees were reassigned and others left. AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict the 3D structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes. This kind of thing used to take years. The technology is now being used to develop therapies for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. This work actually earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry. In addition to the aforementioned shakeups, Google has announced plans to invest up to $40 billion with Anthropic. The company invested $10 billion back in April, with $30 billion more coming if Anthropic meets specific performance milestones.

Google chief scientist Jeff Dean leaving in AI reshuffle after 27 years at company

Google's AI divisions are getting reshuffled, the search giant announced on Wednesday, with chief scientist Jeff Dean leaving the company after 27 years. Dean, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, is starting his own company, Google said in a blog post on Wednesday. The departure is on friendly terms and Google will invest in his startup, a representative said. "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," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a note to staff. "Jeff and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering." Dean has been credited with some of Google's most important technical breakthroughs dating back to 1999, when he joined the company. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is moving into a chairman role of that unit. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently DeepMind CTO and chief AI architect, will take over day-to-day leadership of the AI division and a senior vice president title. He will lead the development of Gemini 4, the company's next major AI model. "I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability," Hassabis said in a note to employees. He added he would work with Pichai on "strategic and global" matters related to artificial intelligence.

Google Shakes Up A.I. Leadership

Google shook up its artificial intelligence leadership on Wednesday, moving Demis Hassabis, the Nobel-prize winning head of its Google DeepMind lab, out of his operational role to become chair of the lab and chief scientist of Google's parent company, Alphabet. The new job for Dr. Hassabis was announced minutes after Jeff Dean, another key A.I. researcher, said he was leaving the company to create a start-up with three other senior Google researchers. The changes atop Google's A.I. leadership represent a dramatic management shake-up as concerns grow over the tech industry's spending on A.I. They also raise questions about Google's confidence in its work on the technology. Even though Google, under Dr. Dean's research leadership, created some of the key technologies underpinning today's A.I., it was caught flat-footed when OpenAI unveiled the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, launching the A.I. boom. Since then, Google has reorganized the company and even remade the Google search homepage around A.I. But by some measurements, it has continued to trail OpenAI and its rival Anthropic. Google was expected to release a new flagship A.I. model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, in June, but that launch was delayed. Google released several smaller models in July, including one focused on cybersecurity. That model performed well on benchmarks like coding and financial tasks, according to A.I. leaderboards, but did not outpace models from competitors. "I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities," Mr. Hassabis wrote, so that he could "focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability." Google said Dr. Hassabis, who joined the company in 2014 after it acquired DeepMind and won an Nobel Prize in 2024 for using A.I. to predict the structures of millions of proteins, would be replaced by Koray Kavukcuoglu. Dr. Kavukcuoglu was among the first researchers hired by Dr. Hassabis at DeepMind. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Google DeepMind shakeup: Gemini co-leads quit for a startup

Google said two people were leaving DeepMind. Their startup's website, live the same day, lists four founders. Sundar Pichai's memo on Wednesday thanked Jeff Dean for "an incredible 27-year run" and said he was off to start a company with Sanjay Ghemawat. He posted the same two names on X. Discovery Loop's website names four. The two Google skipped are Quoc Le, who co-founded Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, whose X bio reads "Gemini co-lead". Dean's own LinkedIn says "Gemini overall co-technical lead". So on the day Google named the executive who will build Gemini 4, both of Gemini's co-technical leads walked out. The part Google did announce Demis Hassabis is giving up the day-to-day running of Google DeepMind. He becomes its chair and chief scientist of Alphabet, keeps Isomorphic Labs, and moves into DeepMind's new Platform 37 offices in London. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the lab's technology chief, takes over as senior vice president and reports straight to Pichai. He gets Gemini 4, CNBC reported. Kavukcuoglu has spent 13 years at DeepMind. He started its deep learning team and led the work behind WaveNet and DQN. He is not an outsider parachuted in, and nobody has questioned the choice. The departures were paragraph four. Thirteen years, one email Vinyals said goodbye on X, and the note is worth reading twice. He arrived at Google 13 years ago after "a quick email exchange" with Dean. He worked on seq2seq and distillation, then co-led AlphaStar and Gemini. Then the twist. "The best part? The same person who brought me in is challenging me to take the next leap." Dean recruited him in 2013 and has now recruited him out. A company with no office Discovery Loop barely exists yet. Steven Levy, who interviewed all four for Wired, reports the idea came together only weeks ago. There are no staff and nowhere to sit. "Our immediate order of business is to find office space," Dean wrote. The timing is almost too neat. On 25 July, Dean stood in front of 6,000 would-be founders at Y Combinator's Startup School and gave a talk billed as the number one rule for building in AI. The interviewer asked what areas startups should tackle. Eleven days later he announced his own. They pitched a handful of VC firms with a deck. Few founders have a prior-work slide that lists TensorFlow and TPUs. The bet: AI as the researcher "Scientific discovery is bottlenecked," the site argues. Not the method, which it calls one of humanity's great inventions, but the execution. Someone still has to propose an experiment, run it, read the results, and go again, one loop at a time. Discovery Loop wants to automate the loop and run thousands in parallel. It starts with machine learning research, then does something telling: it points those capabilities at its own stack and becomes its own first customer. Only then does it go after the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges, from better medicines to clean water to securing cyberspace. Le, who spent years automating model design at Google, sees the first target clearly. "It might be that we will discover a different transformer architecture," he told Wired. Vinyals named the hole in the plan. "One of the things that we'll be obviously very focused on is how these models come up with new ideas to try," he said. "That's not something that currently they're super strong at." Vinod Khosla, who is funding it, was less measured. Backing the four could produce something "larger than the impact that Google had", he wrote. His thesis, as he put it to Wired, is a swap of roles. People have been using AI to do research. Here, AI is the researcher. Alphabet is on the cap table This is not a raid, and Google is not pretending otherwise. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-led the seed round. Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital and Alphabet itself joined, and the New York Times reports Google holds a stake. Nobody is disclosing the size or the valuation. Radical's Jordan Jacobs takes a board seat. Google is the cloud partner and will supply the compute for year one. It also wants a joint research framework on machine learning systems. "Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions," Pichai wrote, "from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era." Warm, and entirely true. It still names two. The market read it as subtraction Alphabet fell around 5%, touching $362.31 in New York, Bloomberg reported. It called the overhaul seismic and said it cast doubt over the leadership of a critical growth area just as competition sharpens. The backdrop is unhelpful. Google's next flagship model has slipped several times this year, Business Insider reported, including one Gemini Pro delay over coding performance. The company also turned cash flow negative for the first time on record last quarter, while guiding to capital spending of up to $205bn. The commentary ran harsher than the coverage. "Game over," wrote Tae Kim, calling Dean and Hassabis the two most important AI executives at Google. The researcher Nathan Lambert reckoned the episode will be studied for years as the incumbent that held every advantage and could not get moving. Axios was cooler and no kinder, placing the reshuffle inside a company "struggling to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic". Not everyone read a verdict. Steven Sinofsky, who once ran Windows, called the four's work truly generational. He noted that fusing research with product has been a brass ring of corporate labs for as long as computer science has existed. Researchers leaving to build is the oldest story in the industry. Google's own numbers cut the other way too. The Gemini app is past 950 million monthly users and Gemma downloads are past 900 million, a quarter after Pichai told doubters Google is not losing the AI race. Hassabis goes long Hassabis framed his move as a choice about where to spend himself. "We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history," he wrote. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand." He wanted the time and space for the big picture rather than daily operations. The rest goes to drug discovery. "It's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer." Isomorphic, now moving into trials, is where that claim gets settled. One detail travels badly from California. Alphabet's chief scientist, the person it has put in charge of thinking about AGI, will be sitting in London. Two companies, one claim Put Wednesday's two documents side by side and the same boast appears in both. Pichai's memo calls Google "the only company that has the full stack", world-class at every layer from infrastructure to frontier models to applications. Discovery Loop's site says its founders have "true full-stack depth that spans chips, hardware infrastructure, software infrastructure, ML models, and products". One of those companies employs tens of thousands of people. The other has four and no office. Their shared credit list runs from Search and MapReduce through Spanner, TensorFlow, TPUs, AlphaFold and Gemini, which makes the claim cheeky rather than absurd. None of this is new pressure on Google. TNW has covered the morale and talent strain inside DeepMind before. What is new is the arithmetic: one promotion announced, four researchers gone. The site closes on the line Google will find hardest to answer. "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today." Four people just left a massive team to test it, on compute Google is selling them, with Alphabet's money in the round. Gemini 4 will tell us who was right.

The startup idea that convinced a UW computer science legend to leave Google after 27 years

Speaking in June at the University of Washington Allen School commencement, AI pioneer Jeff Dean told computer science graduates how he "got the itch to join a startup in 1999," landing at Google when it had a grand total of 20 people above what is now a T-Mobile store in Palo Alto. Twenty-seven years later, now 58, the UW alum has the itch again. Google announced Wednesday that Dean, its chief scientist, is leaving with three colleagues to launch Discovery Loop, a startup automating the process of scientific research: proposing experiments, running them, evaluating results, and iterating, thousands of times over. "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today," they write on their website. Discovery Loop is based in Palo Alto, with what it describes as a lean team of its own. Joining Dean are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, his collaborator of more than two decades; Google DeepMind research VP Oriol Vinyals; and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le. Google is a founding investor and will supply computing power for at least the first year. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, with backing from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures (a name Seahawks fans will recognize from the team's incoming ownership group). The departures came as part of a broader shakeup announced in a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai. Demis Hassabis is handing off day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind to become its chair and Alphabet's chief scientist, while CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up as SVP, overseeing Gemini model development. Alphabet shares fell about 4% after the announcement "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," Pichai wrote. Dean, who earned his UW computer science Ph.D. in 1996, gave no hint of his plans at the Allen School commencement. He told Wired the idea came together only in recent weeks. But the general theme was there. Listing problems he thought worth solving, he pointed the UW graduates toward "developing tools that accelerate scientific discovery and engineering." "One of the beauties of software," he said during his commencement address, "is that small groups of people can build things that have enormous impact in the world."

Demis Hassabis drops DeepMind CEO role to become Chair and focus on AGI

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced changes to the Google DeepMind team today, including a new role for Demis Hassabis. Demis Hassabis was CEO of Google DeepMind, and is now handing over "day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM." Hassabis is now Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder. -- Hassabis Pichai says this role "allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI." Hassabis describe this change as giving him the "time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability." Google DeepMind will now be led by Koray Kavukcuoglu. He was previously Chief Technology Officer of GDM and will now become Senior Vice President (SVP), reporting to Pichai. In this role, he will "oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams." * Pichai: "Koray has been at DeepMind since its early days, and over his 13 years there, he has started our deep learning team and led the way on breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN. I look forward to seeing him lead GDM into this next chapter." * Hassabis: "Koray and I have been working together for over 13 years, since the early days of DeepMind. He is one of the world's foremost AI experts and has been championing GDM's mission from day one. I have total confidence in Koray, Josh, and the rest of the GDM exec team as they continue to spearhead the latest AI developments across Google. The Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while, and I'm excited about the great progress we're making with our new models including Gemini 4."

Four Top Google A.I. Researchers Form New Start-Up

Jeff Dean, who for years was one of Google's most important executives, is leading the new artificial intelligence company with the backing of Google. Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, and three other artificial intelligence researchers are leaving the company to form their own start-up, a move that exposes the changing power structure inside Google and shows there is still plenty of venture money willing to back new A.I. ideas. Dr. Dean, Google's 30th employee, is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of the company. He played a key role in creating the global computer network powering its search business and was one of the company's early leaders in A.I. research. His profile inside Google appeared to wane in recent years as other executives, including the co-founder Sergey Brin, asserted control over Google's all-in bet on A.I. But Dr. Dean remained one of the key engineers driving the creation of the company's most important technologies. His new company, called Discovery Loop, joins a growing list of prominent start-ups chasing a goal that has obsessed Silicon Valley researchers for decades. Dr. Dean and his collaborators want to build A.I. that can improve itself with little or no help from humans. They believe that this mind-bending process, called recursive self-improvement, can significantly accelerate the development of A.I. The same techniques, they say, can then help design new kinds of computer hardware, discover new drugs, create new materials and speed other forms of scientific discovery. "We think there is opportunity for A.I. to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," Dr. Dean said in an interview at his home in Silicon Valley. "You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances." As Google battles to match the A.I. delivered by smaller companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, prominent researchers, lured by a deep pool of venture funding and the chance to run their own companies, continue to leave the tech giant. Over the past year, Google lost several top researchers, including Peter Norvig, who spent 25 years as Google's head of research, to A.I. start-ups such as Recursive Superintelligence, one of the many other companies focused on recursive self-improvement. "It is just a very different environment inside a start-up. It is much more fast-paced and focused," said Tim Rocktäschel, who left Google earlier this year to help found Recursive Superintelligence. "You are a smaller team. There is much less bureaucracy and politics." Dr. Dean, 58, expected to leave Google in the next few days for his new job as the start-up's chief executive. He will be joined by Sanjay Ghemawat, his close collaborator of more than two decades; Quoc Le, whose research helped inspire the creation of today's A.I. chatbots; and Oriol Vinyals, who had overseen the design of Google's chatbot technologies with Dr. Dean since 2023. The new company is backed by seed funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures and several Silicon Valley investors, including Google's parent company. The departing Google researchers declined to reveal how much money their start-up has raised, but they appear to be leaving Google on good terms. Google's parent company, Alphabet, has also agreed to provide the computing power they need to build their A.I. technologies for at least the next year, Dr. Dean said. "Over 27 years, Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern A.I. era," Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said in a statement. "On a personal note, it's been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay." Google will collaborate with the new start-up, Mr. Pichai said. Dr. Vinyals said he believed it was important to have the freedom to shape their own company. "Having extreme focus is very powerful," he said in an interview. "The ultimate form of extreme focus is when it is the only thing that matters -- when it aligns with the mission of the company." Dr. Dean joined Google in 1999. Along with Dr. Ghemawat and others, he designed the enormously complex software systems that allowed Google's search engine to reliably and efficiently respond to search queries from billions of people across the world. With names like MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner, these systems served as a template for the rest of the industry, showing companies like Amazon and Meta how to juggle traffic from a global audience. Dr. Dean and Dr. Ghemawat are the only two Google employees to be named a "senior fellow," the company's highest technical honor. In 2011, Dr. Dean led the creation of Google Brain, an A.I. research lab that touched off an industrywide push toward A.I. The lab's early hires included Dr. Le and Dr. Vinyals, who helped develop a language translation technology, later called Google Translate, that proved to be a significant milestone in the race to A.I. But after Google's team of researchers, including Dr. Le and Dr. Vinyals, helped to pioneer the technology that drives today's chatbots, the company was slow to realize its potential. Months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, jump-starting the A.I. boom in late 2022, the tech giant merged Google Brain with DeepMind, its London-based research lab. The DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis led the new lab, called Google DeepMind, while Dr. Dean and Dr. Vinyals oversaw the design of Gemini, the company's answer to ChatGPT. In 2024, a third pioneering researcher, Noam Shazeer, joined them in this role, before departing the company less than two months ago to join OpenAI. When Mr. Brin returned to Google, the company accelerated its A.I. work, but its technologies, by some measurements, continue to trail those produced by U.S. start-ups like Anthropic and OpenAI -- or even Chinese companies like Moonshot and Z.ai. As Google has begun to work more closely with the Trump administration, Dr. Dean has been among a number of employees to push back against the government. Earlier this year, he was one of the few Silicon Valley executives to speak out when federal agents killed protesters in Minneapolis, calling the shootings "absolutely shameful." He was also among the Google employees who filed a legal brief in support of a suit that Anthropic filed against the Defense Department, after the Pentagon barred government agencies from using the start-up's technologies. Dr. Dean said that unlike Google, his new company would operate as a public benefit corporation, or P.B.C., which is a for-profit corporation designed to create public and social good. Anthropic, OpenAI and other A.I. companies have adopted a similar structure. "There is a lot of good that can be done in the world if we can distribute scientific discoveries broadly," he said. "We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's purist financial interests."

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down

Why it matters: Google's AI organization is undergoing a profound change as the company struggles to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic. The big picture: The moves are the latest in a series of departures and shifts at Google as frontier AI models have been advancing rapidly in recent months. Driving the news: Hassabis will also add the title of chief scientist for Google parent company Alphabet and also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the company's AI drug discovery spinoff. * Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current Chief Technology Officer of Google DeepMind will serve as senior VP of the unit, reporting to Sundar. * Dean and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider.

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

Google DeepMind is undergoing a major restructure. 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 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 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.

Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop

Dean is departing alongside three other Google veterans to build an AI-for-science startup backed by Google as an investor and cloud partner Jeff Dean is leaving Google $GOOGL after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation focused on using AI to automate scientific and engineering research, the company said Wednesday. Google will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner in the new venture. The three others making the leap with Dean are Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow, Oriol Vinyals, who served as a vice president at DeepMind, and Quoc Le, one of Google Brain's co-founders, according to the Wall Street Journal. At launch, the company intends to tackle automation of machine-learning research and engineering, before eventually branching out into areas such as hardware design, drug discovery, and clean energy challenges, the Journal said. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the seed round, though the round is not closed and the startup declined to disclose its valuation. Dean said the company's name reflects the idea that scientific discovery -- generating a hypothesis, running an experiment, and evaluating results -- can be automated through machine learning. "Particularly in a lot of domains, you can fully computerize that whole loop," he said. Ghemawat said the founders wanted to build infrastructure with different requirements than what Google maintains for its consumer and advertising products. The departures are part of a broader leadership reshuffle at Google. In the same announcement, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, will step down from that role to become the unit's chairman and chief scientist of parent company Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery spinoff. Koray Kavukcuoglu, who currently serves as Google DeepMind's chief technology officer, is being elevated to a senior vice president position within the unit and will take charge of Gemini model development, the company said. Alphabet stock fell about 4% following the announcement. The shuffle comes after a string of high-profile talent exits at Google. Alphabet stock tumbled as much as 7% in late June after Noam Shazeer, who co-led the Gemini models, departed for OpenAI and Nobel Prize-winning researcher John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic within days of each other. Google has also not yet released its latest frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, as it works to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic. Dean came aboard Google in 1999 as employee number 30 and went on to co-found Google Brain, the company's pioneering deep-learning research organization, in 2011. He was also the driving force behind Google's tensor processing units, the specialized chips underlying its large language models, the Journal said. Pichai said Dean and Ghemawat "helped drive some of the most significant technology transitions" during their tenures, from early search infrastructure to the neural networks that shaped modern AI.

The next chapter of our AI momentum

Editor's note: Today, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shared some changes with Google DeepMind teams, including new roles for Demis Hassabis and Koray Kavukcuoglu. Below are the messages Sundar and Demis sent to employees. We've made extraordinary progress to deliver on our full AI stack. We've got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company. And you saw the incredible momentum at earnings across all our businesses, including Search, YouTube, and Cloud. Our Gemini models are in high demand among developers and businesses, and the Gemini app reached 950M+ monthly users. Meanwhile, our AI research continues to drive field-defining breakthroughs (like last week's Gemini Robotics advances). We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier. At the same time, there's never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science. Today Demis, Koray and I are sharing a few changes to our Google DeepMind teams that will enable us to do both. AGI and science: Demis has described us as standing in the foothills of the singularity, and has been spending a lot of his time engaging externally. He and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI. It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it. So, moving forward, Demis will become the Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. He'll remain closely connected to Koray, Josh, and our GDM teams, advising across models and research. I'm so excited for Demis -- this is truly his life's work and purpose. You can read Demis's note to GDM below. Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads. We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve. I'm really excited for our upcoming model releases and the progress we're seeing. We have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here. Koray, the current Chief Technology Officer of GDM and our Chief AI Architect, will step up as SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting to me. He will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Koray has been at DeepMind since its early days, and over his 13 years there, he has started our deep learning team and led the way on breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN. I look forward to seeing him lead GDM into this next chapter. Lastly, 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. Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era. On a personal note, it's been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay, and I wish them all the best! We'll continue to work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances. We are at a dynamic moment with so much opportunity ahead. With today's changes we're going to keep driving our momentum. Onwards!

Google's AI Leadership Is Undergoing Some Major Changes. The Stock Is Sliding

Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise. Shareholders are not taking kindly to Google's AI leadership changes. Shares of Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) were down over 4% in recent trading, leading Dow decliners after CEO Sundar Pichai announced several moves in a blog post. Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, a 27-year employee, and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat will be leaving to launch an AI startup called Discovery Loop that will "accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering," Pichai wrote. Google will invest in the startup. Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis, who has served as CEO of Google Deep Mind, will now become the unit's chair, as well as chief scientist of Alphabet. "I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability," Hassabis wrote. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently Google DeepMind's technology chief and Google's chief AI architect, will become the unit's SVP and "oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams," Pichai wrote. The company has yet to release its highly anticipated Gemini 3.5 Pro next-generation frontier model, and did not give an update during its second-quarter earnings call two weeks ago. "The Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while, and I'm excited about the great progress we're making with our new models including Gemini 4," Hassabis wrote. Despite Wednesday's pullback, Alphabet shares are up about 16% this year.

Google's Jeff Dean launches AI startup Discovery Loop

Announcing the venture on X, Dean wrote, "We are founding Discovery Loop... a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress." He added that the four founders have worked together for between 14 and 30 years, helping build Google's AI models, products and computing infrastructure. Jeff Dean, Google's longtime chief scientist, has launched Discovery Loop, a new artificial intelligence startup with longtime Google colleagues Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, all of whom most recently held senior AI and engineering roles at the company. Announcing the venture on X, Dean wrote, "We are founding Discovery Loop... a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress." He added that the four founders have worked together for between 14 and 30 years, helping build Google's AI models, products and computing infrastructure. According to the official website of Discovery Loop, the company is focused on building AI systems that automate the iterative process of scientific discovery. Its research agenda includes generating hypotheses, designing experiments, analysing results and improving subsequent iterations to accelerate progress in machine learning, science and engineering. It also states that the company aims to develop systems that can support researchers through the entire discovery process, with an initial focus on machine learning before expanding into other scientific and engineering disciplines. Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis will take ⁠the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff.

Google's Frontier AI Ambitions Gutted As DeepMind's CEO Steps Down, Its Chief AI Scientist Leaves, And Its Coding Hopes Now Rest On A $1.5 Billion Deal With A Startup

With Google's frontier AI models again reported to have fallen behind their competitors, as evidenced by the recurring launch delays for Gemini 3.5 Pro, which has supposedly fallen short of Google's internal goals, there were increasing rumblings of a widespread upheaval over at Google. Now, just a few days after Google released the Gemini 3.6 Flash to middling reviews, the architect of Google's AI strategy over the past 15 years or so, Jeff Dean, is leaving to build an AGI-focused enterprise, while the incumbent CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, is stepping down from his apex role. Google's AI-focused division, DeepMind, in deep disarray as the architect of its overarching AI strategy departs and its CEO steps down Google has just published a blog, disclosing that the incumbent CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, is stepping down from his apex role to become the Chair of DeepMind and the Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Google's parent company. But the bigger news came just on the heels of this development, with Jeff Dean, a 27-year veteran at Google and the architect of its AI strategy, announcing his departure along with that of Sanjay Ghemawat to form a new public benefit corporation, called Discovery Loop, to further the cause of AGI. As the lone saving grace, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google will become a founding member and a cloud partner of Discovery Loop. Of course, this upheaval could not have come at a worse time for Google, with its frontier credentials on AI models now at stake. Cognizant of the yawning precipice that it now faces, Business Google is reportedly negotiating with the San Fransico-based startup, Mechanize, to improve the coding abilities of its Gemini AI models in a deal that might be worth as much as $1.5 billion, and might involve hiring some key Mechanize team members. So, let me get this straight: Apple is paying Google around $1 billion per year to supposedly distill Gemini models for its Apple Foundation Models (AFM), and now Google is mulling a payment of $1.5 billion to Mechanize to improve its own models? What kind of weird circular financing-type arrangement is this? Apple might as well license Mechanize's expertise directly. In what is truly a sad state of affairs, Google was the original architect of LLMs, but ceded leadership to OpenAI because of its bureaucratic sloth, and now finds itself trying to find salvation with nascent AI startups. How the mighty have fallen! Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.

Google shakes up AI leadership as DeepMind chief shifts role

Google's AI division sees a significant leadership overhaul and key departures. Demis Hassabis moves to chief scientist while Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over daily operations. Several prominent AI engineers, including Jeff Dean, have left to form a new startup. This shakeup occurs as Google's Gemini model faces launch delays and competitive pressure. The company faces challenges in its artificial intelligence development race. Google parent company Alphabet on Wednesday announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company. The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which scooped up a star Google AI staffer this summer. Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state ⁠of AI ⁠in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change. "[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate companywide memo. "It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it." Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet's chief AI architect. Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le - some of Google's most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders - left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and ⁠engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation. Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing. Hassabis - who has long prioritized research over profits - will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, a Google spokesperson told ⁠Reuters. In his company memo, Hassabis touted the "great progress" on Google's AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4. He also said in his memo that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind for which he is the founder and CEO. "I've always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health," he said. "It's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer." BRAIN DRAIN Dean and Hassabis were considered the two leading AI figures at Google for years before the field became the center of technological innovation. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to run the lab from London after selling it to Google for around $650 million in 2014. Dean in 2011 co-founded Google Brain, a U.S.-based unit he led that researched AI separately from Hassabis' team. By then, he was already a revered figure inside Google known for his collaboration with Ghemawat on many of the landmark infrastructure projects that still power the company today. In 2023, after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organization called Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed its CEO and Dean ⁠its chief scientist. Until recently, Dean, Vinyals and Noam Shazeer had co-led development of Gemini. Under their stewardship, Google released Gemini 3 last November which the industry widely saw as closing the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI. But subsequent advances from those rivals, as well as momentum for cheaper Chinese open-source models, have set Google on the defensive. At Google's annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other Google leaders touted Gemini's cost advantage, rather than its state-of-the-art capabilities. Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than two years after Google paid billions to hire him and a team of his researchers away from the startup he led. The same week, senior research scientist John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize alongside Hassabis in 2024, said he would join Anthropic. Vinyals, Le and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever coauthored a 2014 research paper that became foundational to modern AI research by establishing the concept that scaling up data to "pre-train" AI systems would send them to new heights. Discovery Loop received investment from Google and also penned a partnership with its cloud division to provide computing capacity.

Google's Longtime AI Strategist Leaving to Launch Own Company | PYMNTS.com

As the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Wednesday (Aug. 5), Dean is one of the tech giants earliest employees -- joining the company in 1999 as its 30th hire -- and has spent the last 15 years helping shape its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. Dean will serve as CEO of the new company, a public-benefit corporation dubbed "Discovery Loop," whose mission, per its website, is "automating discovery to accelerate science and engineering for the world." He is joined by three other Google veterans: Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat, who have driven high-profile advances in mathematics and protein structure and are among the most cited researchers in the world, the WSJ said. "The four of us have been chatting about this a little bit and we got excited," Dean said in an interview with the WSJ. "We think by automating many of the classical experimental-loop aspects with machine learning models, augmenting human scientists and engineers, we'll be able to make it possible to explore more space in broad science areas to accelerate discovery." Google is providing cloud and computing capacity to Discovery Loop and is also an investor in the company, the report said. However, the scientists told the WSJ they decided they needed to leave the larger company to pursue their new mission. "We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now," Ghemawat said. He argued that Google's infrastructure is good for larger consumer apps and ad systems and search but has "very different requirements than the type of infrastructure we want to build for research." The WSJ notes that Dean is among several AI leaders to have left Google in recent months. Noam Shazeer, Character.AI co-founder and co-author of the famous 2017 transformer paper that helped usher in the current AI revolution, stepped down to take a job with OpenAI. And John Jumper, a Nobel Prize-winning Google DeepMind artificial intelligence scientist, announced in June he was leaving the company for Anthropic. Last week, the Financial Times reported that DeepMind had disbanded the team behind its Nobel Prize-winning Alpha Fold AI system as part of an overhaul of its research strategy. Google last month reported quarterly earnings that showed demand from enterprise customers for computing capacity, Gemini models and AI applications had helped drive an 82% increase in Google Cloud revenue and pushed Cloud backlog to $514 billion.

Google shakes up AI leadership as DeepMind chief shifts role | BreakingNews

Google parent company Alphabet on Wednesday announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company. The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which scooped up a star Google AI staffer this summer. Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state of AI in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change. "[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate companywide memo. "It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, ⁠and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it." Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet's chief AI architect. Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le - some of Google's most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders - left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on ⁠researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation. Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing. Hassabis - who has long prioritised research over profits - will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, a Google spokesperson said. In his company memo, Hassabis touted the "great progress" on Google's AI models, including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4. He also said in his memo that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind, for which he is the founder and ⁠CEO. "I've always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health," ⁠he said. "It's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer." Dean and Hassabis were considered the two leading AI figures at Google for years before the field became the centre of technological innovation. - Reuters

Google reshuffles its AI operations, Jeff Dean leaves group after 27 years

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and a pioneer of artificial intelligence within the company, will leave after 27 years to create an independent public-benefit company with Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google Senior Fellow. Alphabet said it would support the venture by investing in it. In an internal memo, CEO Sundar Pichai praised Jeff Dean's career, calling him one of the key architects of Google's technological advances since joining in 1999. The reorganization also affects Google DeepMind. Its CEO, Demis Hassabis, will become president of the division and step back from day-to-day operational management to focus on strategic and international issues related to artificial intelligence. He will now work directly alongside Sundar Pichai to set the group's long-term direction in this area. Operational leadership of Google DeepMind will be handed to Koray Kavukcuoglu, the division's current chief technology officer, who will take the title of senior vice president. He will be responsible in particular for overseeing the development of Gemini 4, Google's next major artificial intelligence model. The new structure is intended to strengthen governance of the group's AI activities while preparing for the next development phase of its technologies.

Google shakes up AI leadership as DeepMind chief shifts role

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Google parent company Alphabet on Wednesday announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company. The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which scooped up a star Google AI staffer this summer. Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state of AI in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change. "[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate companywide memo. "It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it." Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet's chief AI architect. Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le -- some of Google's most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders -- left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation. Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing. Hassabis -- who has long prioritized research over profits -- will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, a Google spokesperson told Reuters. In his company memo, Hassabis touted the "great progress" on Google's AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4. He also said in his memo that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind for which he is the founder and CEO. "I've always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health," he said. "It's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer." BRAIN DRAIN Dean and Hassabis were considered the two leading AI figures at Google for years before the field became the center of technological innovation. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to run the lab from London after selling it to Google for around $650 million in 2014. Dean in 2011 co-founded Google Brain, a U.S.-based unit he led that researched AI separately from Hassabis' team. By then, he was already a revered figure inside Google known for his collaboration with Ghemawat on many of the landmark infrastructure projects that still power the company today. In 2023, after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organization called Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed its CEO and Dean its chief scientist. Until recently, Dean, Vinyals and Noam Shazeer had co-led development of Gemini. Under their stewardship, Google released Gemini 3 last November which the industry widely saw as closing the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI. But subsequent advances from those rivals, as well as momentum for cheaper Chinese open-source models, have set Google on the defensive. At Google's annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other Google leaders touted Gemini's cost advantage, rather than its state-of-the-art capabilities. Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than two years after Google paid billions to hire him and a team of his researchers away from the startup he led. The same week, senior research scientist John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize alongside Hassabis ?in 2024, said he would join Anthropic. Vinyals, Le and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever coauthored a 2014 research paper that became foundational to modern AI research by establishing the concept that scaling up data to "pre-train" AI systems would send them to new heights. Discovery Loop received investment from Google and also penned a partnership with its cloud division to provide computing capacity. (Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)