Google AI Faces Major Leadership Shakeup as Jeff Dean Departs and Demis Hassabis Steps Back

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.

Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup

Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup. Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google, Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO. Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research. Discovery Loop says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted. The startup is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI (a process known as recursive self-improvement), which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely. "While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck," the company said in a press release. "Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops." Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery has been a key interest of the science and tech communities for many years, but until recently, it remained a largely experimental field with limited commercial application. The company has received financial support from a number of different sources, including Google's parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participated. "The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries," the founding team said in a joint statement. "By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner." Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was Google's 30th employee. Over the years, he has contributed to Google search's core infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing system, and its query-serving system. He has also had a significant impact on Google Gemini's multimodal models, and played a leading role in the company's early AI research. "We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," Dean told the New York Times. "You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances."

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?

The messy politics behind Google's big AI shakeup

In the AI industry, Google prides itself on seeming like the adult in the room: quiet, stable, time-tested. On Wednesday, even as the company announced its largest AI org shakeup yet, Google and its leaders presented a unified front, keeping their messaging focused on how the changes tee up future success. But the reality is that the laundry list of executive changes likely signal deeper issues within Google's AI organization. That starts with its tenuous position in the AI race, and it stretches to problems like Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis' interest in longer-term research over shorter-term product shipping, as well as bubbling political opposition from top employees like DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean. A current Google employee, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said one of the changes -- Dean's departure -- is an example of "the vestiges of Google's idealism" fully dying out. "Losing Jeff continues the brain drain at Google," they said. "Mediocrity is the likely result." Wednesday's news rocked the AI industry, which is difficult to do during an era when AI researchers are constantly switching between roles and labs like a game of musical chairs. Google announced that Demis Hassabis is stepping away from DeepMind's day-to-day operations to focus on AGI and research; Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's current CTO, will step up to lead DeepMind in Hassabis' place. At the same time, Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and the company's 30th employee, will leave the organization alongside three top Google AI researchers to form a new AI startup. Google is widely viewed as being the most successful of the established tech giants in the AI race, far surpassing progress by Meta, Amazon, and Apple. But Google is still viewed as slower-moving than OpenAI and Anthropic, and it certainly hasn't lapped them in frontier models. Both Hassabis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made that point in their statements. "We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve," Pichai wrote, adding, "We have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here." Hassabis wrote that the company is entering a "next chapter" and that it has "all the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will." Key figures in the AI industry seemed to view the changes as Hassabis stepping to the side in favor of a faster-moving, product-focused push at GDM. "There's been far more internal competition at Google than I've seen in the last decade primarily around the AI product space," one former Google employee, who recently left the company and had knowledge of Google's AI operations, told The Verge. They added that there's been pressure to hire more employees who can speed up launches of more products, in keeping with the intensifying competition. Another source within the AI industry, who requested anonymity due to ongoing work with AI labs, said, "I agree with everyone's read that this is a sign of Demis' loss of influence." Hassabis hasn't been quiet in sharing that his interests lie in the scientific advancements that could come from AI, perhaps more so than the commercialization of the technology. Pichai wrote in a blog post that Hassabis' next move will focus on "actively shaping the future of AGI" as DeepMind chair and Alphabet's chief scientist, while continuing his role leading the drug-discovery spinoff Isomorphic Labs. But AI leadership is only one of the problems facing Google -- and industry insiders The Verge spoke with kept coming back to one main question: How much of this had to do with increasing ethical conflicts within Google itself? A contributing factor to both Hassabis's role change and Dean's departure may have been Google's deal with the Department of Defense, Tyler Johnston, founder of the nonprofit AI industry watchdog The Midas Project, told The Verge. That deal could potentially allow for the use of Google AI in mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. "This has already caused staff departures and a unionization effort at DeepMind," Johnston said. "There are many signs suggesting Dean and Hassabis may have personally felt opposed. In fact, DeepMind was initially acquired by Google with an agreement not to sell the technology for military or intelligence purposes." Zvi Mowshowitz, a blogger followed closely by AI researchers, echoed that Dean's decision to leave could potentially be "related to Google's decisions on the DoW contract." Dean is leaving to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup that aims to automate thousands of science and engineering experiments in areas like drug discovery, hardware design, clean energy, and material design. Joining him as cofounders are three additional top Google AI researchers: Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. "Losing Jeff feels like a blow for morality and basic human decency within Google," the current Google employee said. "He was one of the few remaining visible, powerful figures here who was willing to speak out on moral issues such as ICE agents executing American citizens, AI surveillance, and autonomous lethal weapons." Dean was one of the most high-profile dissenters to the Department of Defense's labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company stood firm on its red lines for military use of its AI. In March, Dean was one of dozens of tech industry leaders and employees to file an amicus brief in support of Anthropic's lawsuit, laying out concerns over the Trump administration's decision -- as well as about AI's risks and implications. (He also pushed back on the Trump administration in January, saying that ICE's killing of Alex Pretti was "absolutely shameful" and that "every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.") In April, after Anthropic's drawn-out fight with the DoD over its red lines -- prohibiting domestic mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons (with no human in the loop) -- Google became one of the companies to happily fill the gap left by Anthropic's Pentagon blacklisting. Like a handful of other companies, Google signed on to allow the Pentagon to use its AI for "any lawful use." Dean had publicly disavowed both the same red lines in the past. In February, he wrote on X, "Mass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Surveillance systems are prone to misuse for political or discriminatory purposes." And in 2018, both Dean and Hassabis signed a public pledge disavowing lethal autonomous weapons: "We the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine." Alex Turner, a Google researcher who quit over the company's Pentagon deal, wrote in an op-ed last month that Dean's "departure would be a disaster for the company" and that "by signing [the amicus brief], he broke from the company line, which probably made things awkward within the C-suite." In the amicus brief that Dean signed earlier this year, the group wrote, "We build, train, and study the large-scale AI systems that serve a wide range of users and deployments, including in the consequential domains of national security, law enforcement, and military operations." The group described itself as "professionals with direct knowledge of what these systems can and cannot do, and what is at stake when their deployment outpaces the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern them." Dean's departure may remove a high-profile critic, but it certainly won't dispel criticism within the organization as a whole. Since the beginning of the year, an increasing number of Google employees have expressed discontent with the organization's politics. "Sergey [Brin] did a 180 politically, Sundar stood behind Trump at his inauguration," the current Google employee said. "Now one of the only remaining figures at the company willing to speak out on moral issues is gone. Who knows what we will sell out next?"

DeepMind founder ascends to singular AI role at Google

Demis Hassabis will focus more deeply on trying to create artificial general intelligence. Demis Hassabis, the driving force behind Google DeepMind, is ascending to the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company, replacing Jeff Dean who is leaving to work at a start-up. The role will enable Hassabis to "put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," or artificial general intelligence, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the company's Inside Google blog. Hassabis' attention will still be divided, however: He will continue to lead research at Google spin-off Isomorphic Labs, which works on drug discovery, and although he will no longer be CEO of DeepMind, he will be its chair. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He is currently its CTO.

Google shifts AI power back to Brin as DeepMind's Hassabis steps aside

Google is shifting control of its AI effort from London back to Silicon Valley, in a sweeping leadership overhaul that cements the returning influence of co-founder Sergey Brin. According to a dozen people familiar with the Big Tech group, including current and former staff, the changes represent a fundamental reordering of the company's AI leadership, consolidating power in California as Google pushes to commercialise its Gemini models and close the gap with its rivals. Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping back from running Google DeepMind, the AI lab he founded, with day-to-day control passing to new senior vice-president, Koray Kavukcuoglu. The former DeepMind chief technology officer relocated from London to Google's Mountain View headquarters last year and now leads development of Gemini from a desk beside Brin. The overhaul represents a seismic shift at the $4.4tn company, as commercial urgency eclipses the research-led culture that defined its DeepMind lab for more than a decade. Google faces growing pressure to prove it can compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in coding tools and enterprise AI, while contending with an exodus of senior talent and mounting investor concern over the cost of its AI push. People familiar with the reorganisation said the transition had been planned for several months, with Hassabis handing over operational responsibility for Gemini development to Kavukcuoglu as Google accelerated work on its flagship AI models. Meanwhile, Google co-founder Brin, who had largely withdrawn from day-to-day operations for several years, has re-emerged as one of the company's most influential voices on AI strategy since the launch of ChatGPT, taking an increasingly active role in the development of Gemini. Hassabis, who sold DeepMind to Google for £400mn in 2014, will become Alphabet's chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind, allowing him to focus on long-term AI research while relinquishing overall responsibility for the business. While Hassabis is widely admired for his scientific leadership, several people familiar with Google's thinking said senior executives had become frustrated by what they saw as his lesser focus on the commercial demands of the company's AI business. His decision to make AlphaFold, the protein structure prediction system which earned him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, freely available became a source of tension inside Google, according to a person familiar with the matter. The project generated little commercial return despite the scale of its investment. A person close to the company disputed there had been tensions between Google's leaders and Hassabis, saying the Nobel laureate had led the initial launch of Gemini, its most advanced AI model, and was invested in its success. "Demis . . . [has] a vision for research in AI that [he] can pursue more efficiently by doing research [himself] and inspiring others to follow, rather than by being their boss and telling them what to do," said Yann LeCun, a leading AI expert and former chief AI scientist at Meta, who made a similar move away from managerial responsibilities in 2018. "You just want to focus on activities for which you have unique abilities." Several current and former DeepMind employees said the reorganisation had sent shockwaves through the London-based lab, with some fearing it marked the end of the research culture that Hassabis has long protected. One former DeepMind executive at a rival company said they had already received calls from multiple staff who said they were ready to jump ship. The upheaval comes as Google grapples with a broader battle to retain senior AI talent. Jeff Dean, a highly respected AI scientist and 27-year veteran at the company, also announced his departure this week. Dean is founding his own AI start-up, Discovery Loop, alongside three colleagues and will have Google backing. Investors also reacted nervously to the changes. Alphabet's shares fell 5 per cent following the announcements, underscoring concerns about the mounting cost of Google's AI push and the pressure on the company to demonstrate it can translate its research strength into commercially successful products. DeepMind has sat at the heart of Google's AI ambitions since chief executive Sundar Pichai merged it with the research division, Google Brain, in 2023. Hassabis was put in charge of the combined organisation, which went on to absorb Google's remaining AI safety and research teams as well as the Gemini apps business. The expanded unit, which Hassabis described in a statement on Wednesday as the "AI engine room of Google", became responsible for developing the company's family of Gemini large language models and other frontier AI systems. However, people familiar with the company said, over recent years, Brin has also sought to steer decision-making behind the scenes on AI development, despite not having a formal executive position. Over the past year, Hassabis has devoted more time to Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company he founded, and to his new role as one of the technology industry's leading public voices on AI. A friend of Hassabis said: "This is a great outcome for Demis. I know he is feeling relieved and excited about the future. It means he retains a lot of influence without having to move to the US, and frees him up to spend more time on Isomorphic, which he's hugely passionate about." Google enjoyed a resurgence last year with the release of its Gemini 3 models and the viral success of its Nano Banana AI image-editing tool. But people familiar with the company's thinking said executives and board members remained concerned by its weaker position in coding models and enterprise AI, where Anthropic and OpenAI have established an early lead. 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, or AGI, which he said "is close at hand". Google executives have framed the reorganisation as a necessary step to accelerate product development as competition intensifies. "We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier," Pichai said in his announcement of the reorganisation this week. "With today's changes we're going to keep driving our momentum." Additional reporting from Stephen Morris, George Hammond and Tim Bradshaw

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 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's new AI boss inherits a race to catch OpenAI and Anthropic

Google is trying to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic as coding becomes an increasingly important battleground in frontier AI. DeepMind's new boss is set to face intense pressure to close the AI performance gap with OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI and Anthropic have released new systems in recent months that have been both hailed for and prompted concern over their advanced capabilities. On the other hand, Google, which acquired DeepMind in 2014, hasn't unveiled a frontier model since early 2026. Koray Kavukcuoglu, who was previously the AI unit's CTO and parent company Google's chief AI architect, is inheriting a race to catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier -- building the industry's most advanced models. He's stepping up to become SVP, replacing DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis, who becomes the organization's chair. "The goal will undoubtedly be to close the gaps with Anthropic and OpenAI in some areas," Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC. Kavukcuoglu's promotion "feels like a move that is designed to adjust the focus of Google's efforts away from academic projects and more toward a stronger focus on improving frontier performance and improving the toolset for developers," Wood added. Google has lagged behind OpenAI, which set the pace after releasing ChatGPT to the public in 2022. That shifted in November 2025 when Google released Gemini 3. Analysts said the model "moved the frontier forward", with capabilities that "far exceed[ed] what we've typically come to expect from this generation of frontier models." But 2026 has seen OpenAI and Claude maker Anthropic pull ahead with new releases. Anthropic's Mythos model broke new ground, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 was similarly lauded. Following Gemini 3.1 Pro in February, Google's releases this year haven't challenged at the frontier. It assembled an internal team called "Code Strike" to bolster coding capabilities, crucial to the drive to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). Google fell behind Anthropic and OpenAI "because its focus was much more on monetizable areas such as Search, and multi-modal and it lost out on the first clear killer use case, which is coding," Malik Ahmed Khan, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC. Coding is an area where those two companies are "miles ahead" of Google, he added. A Google spokesperson told CNBC it would be inaccurate to say the company was distracted from its mission of solving "intelligence" before solving "everything else." They said the path to AGI will involve pushing on fronts including agents, coding, robotics and world models, and pointed to DeepMind releases across robotics, video and computer use, as well as public policy work and research. Kavukcuoglu is part of DeepMind's old guard, having joined in 2012 before the Google acquisition, and will look to bring renewed focus on challenging Anthropic and OpenAI at the frontier, amid several high-profile departures. Reporting directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams, Pichai said in a statement. Kavukcuoglu's appointment will bring "more focus to GDM, with LLM [large language model] improvements being the clear route forward," Morningstar's Khan said. "We think Google is likely better positioned in the LLM race with these changes than it was without them," he added. "Demis has been much more interested in building AGI that was beyond LLMs," Khan said. Hassabis' tenure leading DeepMind "saw a clear focus on other areas such as multi-modal, such as world models, as well as his work in health, for example with Isomorphic Labs," he added. Kavukcuoglu had been taking on broader responsibilities from Hassabis over the past year, including directing model development and presenting major Gemini releases, a person close to the DeepMind team told CNBC last week. Kavukcuoglu's promotion "shows that Google is prioritizing execution over deep research," Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, told CNBC. "Expect faster releases, more experimentation and an emphasis on developing to a product roadmap." Alphabet shares sank in July after Bloomberg reported that the company had delayed the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro to try and improve performance in areas like coding. "The first step [for Kavukcuoglu] would be to ship Gemini 3.5 Pro if possible, and then prove it wasn't a one-off by maintaining a predictable release cadence," said Nick Patience, AI lead at the Futurum Group. Beyond shipping a model that competes at the frontier, Kavukcuoglu "needs to rebuild the coding and pretraining expertise that walked out the door," he told CNBC. DeepMind was based in London before its acquisition and Hassabis remained in the city as CEO when it became a division within Google. DeepMind's continued presence there spurred the U.K. AI ecosystem. Under his previous role, Kavukcuoglu moved from London to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. "Google is quietly consolidating its AI leadership out of London," Patience said. A Google spokesperson told CNBC it remained committed to its presence in the UK capital. Alphabet shares dropped on Thursday when the AI reshuffle was announced, though the stock has risen around 76% in the last 12 months. Alphabet CEO Pichai said on last month's earnings call that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies are using Gemini Enterprise, stressing the company's ability to sell AI services to cloud customers. "Although the model is behind and they want to catch up and they take that seriously, the monetization of the model is doing extremely well," Sebastian Mallaby, author of "The Infinity Machine," a biography of Hassabis, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday. He pointed to Google's AI being deployed across Android phones and Siri and Apple Intelligence on iPhones. It was wrong to "paint a picture of a general crisis" at the company because of big-name departures, Mallaby added. "It's a big team. It's several thousand people on the Gemini team, if you count everybody. And so we shouldn't over-index on a few famous names." The breadth of Kavukcuoglu's remit -- Gemini model development, the Gemini app and developer teams, and reporting directly to Sundar Pichai -- could also boost Google's AI advantage, said Brian Hopkins, VP, emerging tech and principal analyst at Forrester. "Models, the app, and the developer teams under one executive is how a company organizes a product group rather than a lab," he told CNBC. "This is something that Google knows how to do much better than OpenAI or Anthropic." -- CNBC's MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

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 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 moved its AI power to California. Kavukcuoglu now holds it

Google says Demis Hassabis chose to step back to chase the science he loves. Underneath, AI power at Google has moved from London to California, into the hands of an engineer few outside the lab could name. The headlines went to the man who left. The more telling name is the one who stayed. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind's technology chief, now runs the lab day to day and reports straight to chief executive Sundar Pichai. He inherits what Hassabis is giving up: control of Gemini, and with it Google's standing in the AI race. Last week Google said Hassabis, DeepMind's founder and a Nobel laureate, would step back from running the lab to become its chair and Alphabet's chief scientist. That was the announcement. The shift beneath it is geographic. Google is pulling its AI leadership out of London and concentrating it in California. The engineer who now holds Gemini Kavukcuoglu is not an outsider. He has spent 13 years at DeepMind, started its deep learning team, and led the work behind WaveNet and DQN. Turkish-born, he studied under Yann LeCun at New York University. LeCun calls him a great engineer who built rare research-management skills on the way up. He moved to Mountain View in the past year, and oversight of Gemini moved with him. He is now the only one of Gemini's co-leads still at Google. He also loses his old reporting line to Hassabis and answers to Pichai alone. In Google's bureaucracy, that is the real promotion. Some now tip him to succeed Pichai one day. Why Hassabis really went Two stories explain the exit, and they do not quite agree. The first is Google's, and Hassabis's own. He had been drifting from the day-to-day for a year, Semafor reported, handing consumer AI and Gemini to Kavukcuoglu. He never loved being a tech executive. His passion is the science: AGI, and curing disease through Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery company he still runs. On this telling, he chose to go. The second is sharper. After a 2024 image-generation fiasco, Hassabis demanded more control and won it, consolidating power in London while sitting 5,000 miles from headquarters. People close to DeepMind suspect a falling-out at the top, and that the chess champion was outmanoeuvred by Kavukcuoglu, Bloomberg's Parmy Olson wrote. Google has not addressed that reading, and it remains informed speculation. Both can be partly true. Either way, the map redrew. The strategy Hassabis had gathered in London now sits in California. What Kavukcuoglu has to fix The job is execution, not invention. Google invented the transformer that underpins modern AI, yet rivals shipped it first. Its most powerful Gemini has slipped past a June target and trails on coding, the task eating most of the industry's compute. OpenAI and Anthropic keep poaching its people, from Noam Shazeer to Nobel co-winner John Jumper. The money raises the stakes. Google has guided to capital spending of up to $205bn this year, and its free cash flow turned negative for the first time since its 2004 listing. Investors read the reshuffle as a warning and marked Alphabet down about 4%. Google's own numbers cut the other way. The Gemini app is past 950 million monthly users, and Pichai insists his is the only company with the full AI stack. The talent and the compute are real. What Google has lacked is speed. Kavukcuoglu, quietly, is the man now asked to supply it.

Demis Hassabis Had Reportedly Been Plotting to Leave His DeepMind CEO Job for a Year

An anonymously sourced report from Semafor about Demis Hassabis's departure from his Google DeepMind CEO role, and his transition to a new role as chief scientist at parent company Alphabet, seems eager to clarify that he left of his own volition, and that he had apparently wanted out for a while. Alphabet announced the move as part of a wider leadership shakeup on Wednesday. Sources Semafor calls "two people familiar with [Hassabis's] thinking" apparently said Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, was increasingly unsatisfied with his tech executive job, and longed to be a scientist again. Semafor writes that: "His passions lie in using AI to solve scientific puzzles, like curing diseases and discovering new materials, and in ensuring that AI doesn't accidentally cause catastrophic harm to humanity." To that end, the anonymous people said, this move has been in the works for at least a year, with Hassabis slowly ramping down his duties related to consumer AI at Google and the company's Gemini AI projects, and Google's chief AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu, slowly taking them on. Like many of its comparably sized tech juggernauts, Google is spending money like crazy lately. While it's decidedly not one of those companies that typically fuels its day-to-day operations with investor money and promises of big profits to come, in the second quarter of this year, Google's self-reported free cash flow turned negative for the first time since it went public in 2004. "As a business we are in an incredibly strong position," Hassabis wrote in a memo on Wednesday. No other company, he wrote, "has the full stack." Google DeepMind, he said, "has all the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will." Hassabis will still have a role as chair of Google DeepMind, and will continue to be in charge of Alphabet's AI drug-discovery division Isomorphic Labs. That division is deeply intertwined with AlphaFold, the AI protein-folding program that is, essentially, the work that won Hassabis his Nobel Prize.

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."

Google seeks a sharper focus in AI after Hassabis move

New role for the DeepMind co-founder comes as the competitive frontier in the technology is shifting Google has irons in more AI fires than any other big tech company. From its own specialist chips and cloud platform to its frontier models and search results, the company has carved out a broad position in AI. But this very breadth has exposed the need for sharper strategic focus. That is one message from the shake-up in the ranks of its top AI executives this week. Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day management of AI research at the same time that four top AI figures, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, left for their own AI start-up. One clear message: Google is still grappling with how best to marshal its considerable resources as it struggles to keep an edge in frontier AI research. At the same time, the upheaval points to the new opportunities being thrown up by the widening boundaries in AI development. The big frontier models have been at the centre, but that is changing as the gap between the leaders narrows and stronger competition emerges from Chinese models. Instead, more of the attention is shifting to new agent-based systems with the potential to transform wide areas of research and knowledge work. For the departing Google executives, this looked like too good a moment to miss. Google DeepMind, the AI organisation Hassabis had run and where he will now be chair, had brought together group operations in early 2023, a moment when Google was reeling from the launch of ChatGPT. This involved merging its various AI research efforts into a frontier lab with a broad remit to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. Three years on, this looks ready for refinement. While Hassabis had the title of CEO, his replacement will be a senior vice-president, implying less autonomy in how the unit operates and closer alignment with other Google divisions. Hassabis said he was stepping back to "focus on the big picture", with a wider remit that includes becoming chief scientist of the parent holding company Alphabet. This looks like part of a wider effort to refocus on Gemini (the name of both Google's advanced frontier AI model as well as the consumer app that runs on top of it). There had already been signs that the company was reshuffling AI researchers to work on Gemini, away from other priorities. Explaining the executive moves, CEO Sundar Pichai conceded there were "areas we need to improve". It is little more than a year since Google first came up with a frontier model capable of holding its own against OpenAI and Anthropic, easing worries that it had fallen behind and prompting a strong rally in its share price. Now, though, Gemini is perceived to have fallen behind again and to have lost ground in the booming market for AI coding agents. The upheaval in Google's senior AI ranks also suggests that the capabilities of the leading AI models may be reaching an important threshold, artificial general intelligence. Hassabis said he wanted to spend more time on AGI, which he claimed was "close at hand". While there is little agreement on exactly what this supposed breakthrough moment in AI development will entail, the leading models are already opening up significant new vistas of research. One sign of this has been the departure of Dean and three other top Google AI figures. Their new start-up, Discovery Loop, aims to transform large areas of scientific research by automating the basic scientific process. They aren't alone in believing that AI has reached a level where agentic AI systems like this could revolutionise scientific research. Anthropic announced a similar initiative, called Claude Science, in June. Hassabis, meanwhile, said he will also be "leaning in" more to his work leading Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery start-up he created inside Alphabet in 2021. With the advent of agentic systems to work in fields like this, the competitive frontier in AI is shifting. Increasingly, it resides in the software "harnesses" that control how AI agents call on and apply underlying frontier models, as well as the extra data used to boost their domain knowledge. Coding, scientific research and generic forms of white-collar work (through Claude CoWork) are among the areas the AI agents are already toiling over. The boundaries are likely to expand quickly. Elon Musk, for instance, said this week that his frontier model, Grok, is being trained on SpaceX's entire corpus of engineering data in an attempt to make it the best AI system for use in engineering. As Google overhauls its AI leadership, change is in the air.

Opinion: Demis Hassabis' new role exposes Google's AI balancing act

Google is under pressure to keep pace with OpenAI, Anthropic and other global rivals while justifying its heavy investment in AI infrastructure. Demis Hassabis is one of the defining figures of the AI era. Google recognized his potential early, buying DeepMind just four years after he founded it. What once began as a small London-based company now sits at the heart of Google's fight to lead in artificial intelligence, as the company races to compete with a growing field of global rivals including OpenAI and Anthropic. But a leadership shakeup announced on Wednesday, which saw Hassabis step back from being CEO to become chair of Google DeepMind and parent company Alphabet's chief scientist leave, concerned investors and the share price dropped following the announcement. I have covered DeepMind for more than a decade and recently sat down with Hassabis for an exclusive interview. What may have come as a surprise to many, to me, feels like a natural progression. But the move also exposes the tension at the center of Google's AI strategy: Hassabis wants to use AI to transform science, while Google needs to commercialize, monetize and scale the technology fast enough to justify the billions it is spending. Hassabis has been very vocal about his goals with AI. In our interview on CNBC's podcast "The Tech Download" that was recorded in December, Hassabis said he spent his whole career on AI because it will eventually become "the ultimate tool for science." Over the years, under Hassabis' leadership, DeepMind has made some significant breakthroughs. One of those achievements was AlphaGo, a computer system that took on the best player in the world at the ancient Asian board game Go and won. Another is AlphaFold, an AI software that can predict protein structure folding, which is key for understanding diseases and drug discovery. Hassabis told me none of this would have been possible without Google's backing and the "amount of compute that they could bring to play," referring to the tech giant's ample computing power driven by its own chips. The DeepMind co-founder has been instrumental in pushing the science from within DeepMind at Google. He has also pursued artificial general intelligence, or AGI -- AI that can match human capabilities across most cognitive tasks. Hassabis on Wednesday said he believes AGI is "close at hand" in a blog post on Wednesday accompanying the news of his new role. Hassabis said his motivation for handing over day-to-day operations is to work on strategic and global AGI matters, advise his successor, the new senior vice president of Google DeepMind, Koray Kavukcuoglu, and dedicate time to Isomorphic Labs, a company he co-founded that is dedicated to AI drug discovery. The move from the company's co-founder "isn't out of character," said Sebastian Mallaby, who wrote "The Infinity Machine," about Hassabis and DeepMind. "Demis cared about safety enough that he sold DeepMind to Google, not to Facebook, even though Facebook offered more money. He cared enough about safety that he fought a three-year battle with Alphabet to get external oversight over DeepMind's AI deployment," Mallaby wrote on X on Wednesday. "This next chapter of his career is a return to that side of his work." While scientific work has continued at Google DeepMind, the reality of the current competitive environment is very different. Google's parent Alphabet is planning to spend up to $205 billion this year at a time when investors are scrutinizing Big Tech's capital expenditure. The company is also facing intense competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, hyperscalers and Chinese players. Hassabis said the competitive environment was "ferocious" during our December interview. That signaled to me that, while Google remains supportive of DeepMind's scientific endeavours, perhaps that new level of competition is driving more of a focus on commercialization and monetization of its AI, as well as keeping up, on a technological level, with its rivals. The groundwork was already being laid. Hassabis told me he was talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai nearly every day about "strategic things" while keeping the long-term goals of AGI in focus as well. This allowed Google to ship product faster compared to what they saw as a slower pace than their competitors. The new organizational structure will likely look to continue that division of operations but with deeper integration. There was one more telling comment from Hassabis during our interview: his response to a question about whether the pursuit of AGI should be slowed down. "It's a very complex geopolitical and corporate system that we're in ... there are many companies trying to build this. There are also many nations trying to build it. And there's a sort of race dynamic, which ideally wouldn't be there," Hassabis said. "So in an ideal case, this would be a scientific endeavour, and ... each step would be carefully considered. But unfortunately ... the real world isn't like that, and we have to kind of be pragmatic about where we are." Hassabis went on to say that as DeepMind pushes towards more advanced AI, it is trying to "be as responsible as possible." His comments hit to the heart of the changes we have seen -- there is an intense "race" that Alphabet wants to lead, which might not sync up with where Hassabis wants to put his future efforts. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

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 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.

Google DeepMind Boss Demis Hassabis Steps Down From CEO Role

Google parent company Alphabet just announced major changes to the leadership of its AI lab. The biggest update is that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down from his day-to-day role of running the lab behind the company's Gemini models. Hassabis will now serve as chair of Google DeepMind and take on the new role of chief scientist at Alphabet. He will also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the tech giant's AI drug-discovery company. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, who is now CEO of Microsoft AI. Google acquired the company in 2014. He will be replaced by Google DeepMind Chief Technology Officer Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will take over the lab's daily operations as senior vice president of Google DeepMind. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis said in a blog post about the changes. "With this backdrop, 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." The shakeup arrived as Google faces growing questions about whether it can keep up with other frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. While Google's cloud business is booming, so is its spending. Revenue from the company's cloud unit skyrocketed 82% year over year to $24.8 billion during the second quarter. However, the company is forecasting between $195 billion and $205 billion in capital spending this year, primarily on the infrastructure to support its AI ambitions. Additionally, Google has delayed the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, its flagship model that was expected to launch in June. Bloomberg reported last month, citing unnamed sources, that the model fell short of some internal goals. Axios reported that low morale also played a role. Google, however, is framing the reorganization as a way to speed up its AI work while giving Hassabis more time to focus on artificial general intelligence. "We've got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company," Pichai said in the company's blog post. "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." The leadership overhaul also included a high-profile departure. Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and most recently Google DeepMind's chief scientist, is leaving the company alongside several colleagues to launch a public-benefit corporation called Discovery Loop. Google said it will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner for the new company. In a farewell message posted on X, Dean said Discovery Loop will work to "automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress." Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google DeepMind enters a new era as co-founder Demis Hassabis shifts AI role

Observers express concern that the division has lost its independence and commercial reality has taken over When Sir Demis Hassabis said AI had brought the world to a "pivotal moment in human history" last month, he knew another big change was imminent. This shift was closer to home. The Nobel prize-winning head of Google DeepMind, Google's AI unit, announced this week he was relinquishing his day-to-day duties as chief executive and becoming chair. He is also taking on the role of chief scientist at DeepMind's parent, Alphabet. Hassabis and DeepMind have been key players in AI's breakthrough era. The 50-year-old co-founded DeepMind and sold it to Google in 2014, which gave him the resources to oversee a number of advances. These included building the AlphaGo system that mastered the Chinese board game Go and developing AlphaFold, a programme that predicts the 3D structure of proteins. The latter resulted in Hassabis being jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry. A former Google executive said the leadership overhaul showed London-based DeepMind being brought firmly into the orbit of its parent in Mountain View, California. DeepMind will now be run by Hassabis's longstanding colleague, the US-based Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will take the non-CEO role of senior vice-president of DeepMind. "The era of DeepMind as an independent actor is over and the obvious sign of that is you have gone from a charismatic founder-leader to appointing Koray in a non-CEO leadership role. Koray is a technical character, not an inspirational figure like Demis," said the former executive. The ex-Google employee added that it would be "galling" for Google and Hassabis that the latest iterations of Google's flagship AI model series, Gemini, have lost ground to rival models developed by its US rivals Anthropic and OpenAI. Hassabis has said he was looking forward to focusing more on the "big picture" for AI and believed he was handing over operational management of a unit that was well placed for the competitive battles ahead. Internally, DeepMind is a workplace where there have been political tensions. Employees who spoke to the Guardian said there was internal disquiet over the company's work with the Pentagon. Earlier this year, a former Google DeepMind employee launched a legal challenge against Google, claiming they were unfairly dismissed for their views on Gaza. That employee was involved in unionisation efforts at Google DeepMind, which have taken place against a backdrop of concern that Google's AI could assist militaries, including the Israel Defense Forces. Another Google DeepMind employee resigned from the company in mid-July, citing Google's work with the Pentagon and the US Department of Homeland Security. One said to the Guardian that Hassabis's departure was the "end of an era". "Now the person we were supposed to trust to get the right outcomes for humanity has stepped away," they said. Google DeepMind "has become just another subdivision of Google", they added. Rosa Curling, the executive director of Foxglove, a campaign group that supported the Google DeepMind employee in their legal challenge, said: "The departure of the co-founder of a company that once prided itself on its ethical credentials is likely to cause further concern among its frontier AI staff about how their work will end up being used in the real world." Google has said it is committed to the "private and public sector consensus" that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without "appropriate human oversight". While Google has declined a voluntary union recognition agreement in London, it has said it valued "the constructive and direct dialogue that we have with our employees about building a positive and successful workplace". On the commercial side, a new cutting-edge model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, has yet to be released amid reports it has been delayed owing to attempts to improve its code-writing abilities - a core part of the appeal of Anthropic and OpenAI's best products. Google's two AI labs, London-based DeepMind and California-based Google Brain, were merged into Google DeepMind under Hassabis's leadership three years ago. Control now appears to be moving back to the US, where Google's co-founder Sergey Brin is reportedly playing a bigger role in AI development. Citing the departure of the leading AI researcher Yann LeCun from Meta and Geoffrey Hinton from Google as another example of "the end of an era in the AI ecosystem", the former executive added: "This is very clearly a sign that the science-driven agenda of leadership in these labs has given way to cold, hard commercial reality that all of these companies want to make a return on the hundreds of billions of dollars they have invested in AI." The source added, however, that Google still had the benefit of being able to combine its Gemini models with an impressive suite of products, from its all-conquering search product to its cloud platform and YouTube. Thanks to its search business it also has the money to continue investing heavily in AI, having generated net income - a US measure of profit - of $132bn (£98bn) last year. Hassabis has also taken on a more statesman-like role in recent years. The reference to a "pivotal moment" came in a blogpost in which he called for a US safety body to assess cutting-edge models, with the hope it would lead to the establishment of global standards. The need for such a body, Hassabis argued, was pressing because the tech industry was approaching the "pivotal" point of achieving AGI, the term for a theoretical state of AI where a system can perform any human cognitive task - which also means being capable of performing white collar jobs in sectors such as law, finance and health. A Google spokesperson said: "This is a move Demis has been thinking about for a while. He is very excited, and this will give him more time to focus on AI-driven scientific breakthroughs." They disputed that the changes had anything to do with the performance of Gemini. Hassabis's move was announced alongside the departure of Jeff Dean, a veteran Google engineer and DeepMind's chief scientist, who is leaving along with three other top researchers to form an AI startup called Discovery Loop. According to one former Google employee, Dean's departure could augur further personnel losses. Dean's move also follows OpenAI's poaching in June of Google's Noam Shazeer, a leading figure in the field as co-author of the 2017 research paper Attention is All You Need, a crucial step in developing chatbots. "It's hugely problematic for Google," said Jeremy Nixon, a former AI researcher at Google and founder of Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, a startup. "It's problematic because of who Jeff will hire and because the primary reason people want to work at Google is because of him and Noam Shazeer and all these other phenomenal researchers. It's no longer true to say that if you want to work with the greatest researchers on the planet, you go to Google DeepMind." Nixon added that Dean was an "angelic diplomat" who could "deal with these complex political organisations". Google denies it faces a post-Dean talent crisis, pointing to attrition rates for AI talent for the first half of this year being lower than they were at this time last year. If AI is indeed facing a pivotal moment, Google has just had one.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis stepping into new role

Why it matters: Google is facing delayed models, researcher departures and mounting pressure from OpenAI and Anthropic. * Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind schedule even as OpenAI and Anthropic have released powerful new models that significantly advance the state of the art. * Several top researchers, including Gemini's co-lead, have left for competing AI labs. * There's also been a groundswell of employee pushback: Multiple employees have publicly said they resigned over Google's April deal with the Pentagon that allows the military to use its technology. In addition to Hassabis, Jeff Dean is leaving his role as chief scientist of Google DeepMind to form a new startup along with three other top Google AI colleagues, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current chief technology officer of Google DeepMind, will serve as senior VP of the unit, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai. * A Google spokesperson said that despite being announced the same day, the two announcements were not connected. What they're saying: Outside the company, the moves were seen as both an indictment of Google's current position and a bad omen for future efforts. * "The magnitude of this is hard to understate," former Googler Peter J. Liu wrote in a now-deleted post on X. "The Gemini leadership left (Noam left earlier), Demis is no longer head of DeepMind. More talent will be leaving." * "In order to be competitive today Google needs to catch up on frontier coding," Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of AI subscription service Every wrote on X. "Demis believes different fundamental research directions (like world models) are more important to his long term goal even if they're less impt competitively today." * "Pour one out for the big G, it's so over," Core Automation cofounder (and former Google Distinguished Engineer) Rohan Anil said on X. The other side: Google did not attribute the change in leadership to any perceived model release delays. * Hassabis, CEO Sundar Pichai and Kavukcuoglu all released upbeat memos on the developments. * "We've got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company," Pichai said in his memo, although he did allude to the need for Google to move faster. "We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier." * Kavukcuoglu has been more formally involved in recent model releases than Hassabis and has also successfully navigated the company's complex internal politics, a source familiar told Axios. Between the lines: While Google has absorbed past departures, Dean and Hassabis both have near-legendary status within Google. * Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, was widely viewed as a person that many people felt would be a good steward for Google's ambitions as AI grows ever more powerful. * Dean, meanwhile, has been at Google for 27 years and has been a key figure since its earliest AI efforts. * Some DeepMind employees also see the actions as a further lessening of the once-independent unit's influence within Google, noting that Hassabis was CEO of Google DeepMind, while Kavukcuoglu is only being given the title of senior VP. The bottom line: Google still has have lots going for it, including its own chips and cloud computing units as well as highly profitable products to help fund the massive expenditures needed to keep pace in AI.

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."

Behind the exit of DeepMind's CEO: low morale, a talent exodus, and model delays | Fortune

On Wednesday, at the end of the day in London, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis had some news for employees. Hassabis, DeepMind's co-founder and the lab's longtime steward, was giving up the CEO title and moving to a chairman role, they said. Minutes later, the news broke that long-time chief scientist Jeff Dean and several other prominent researchers were leaving the company. Staff in DeepMind's London office were shocked. They had questions. Was the move a promotion or a demotion? Would Hassabis retain real influence over DeepMind's direction? And was Google finalizing a power shift from the London lab to its Mountain View headquarters? One DeepMind engineer familiar with internal reaction told Fortune employees were "very mixed" on what the reshuffle meant, with some wondering whether the chairman role would ultimately end with Hassabis phased entirely out of the company. In reality, the shock exit was just the tip of the iceberg of what has been a difficult year for Google DeepMind. Within the lab, three current and one former employee told Fortune tensions were already simmering. Delayed models, high-profile exits of talent, and a very public fight with its own staff over controversial defense contracts had left insiders wondering if Google had lost its way in the AI race. Once a frontrunner, the company has recently ceded ground to rivals, especially OpenAI and Anthropic. This was most evident in delays around the release of the company's Gemini 3.5 Pro model, which has missed three release deadlines in recent months. Three of the DeepMind engineers who talked to Fortune blamed the delays on the company failing to prioritize AI coding abilities. And now, for the second time in just four years, the company is again playing catch-up. Google DeepMind is struggling to retain its technical edge, keep hold of top researchers, and contain an employee revolt over its defense work. Pichai's reshuffle -- which employees say shifts power back to Mountain View and pulls DeepMind closer to Google proper -- arrives at a critical moment for the company. But it's also a gamble. Will new leadership restore Google's AI momentum, or worsen internal tensions at crucial moments in the AI race? A leadership shakeup In his note to staff on Wednesday, Hassabis said that he was handing over day-to-day operational responsibilities for the lab to allow him the "time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability." Instead of selecting a new CEO for DeepMind, however, Pichai announced that DeepMind's chief technology officer, Koray Kavukcuoglu, was taking over day-to-day operations as senior vice president, reporting directly to him rather than holding a standalone DeepMind CEO title. Kavukcuoglu, unlike London-based Hassabis, works 6,000 miles away, in the California offices in Mountain View. A Google spokesperson said that Hassabis was moving into an expanded role to focus on advancing science and long-term strategy. Three DeepMind engineers, who asked for anonymity to discuss company matters, told Fortune this represents a broader structural change and a shifting of power to Mountain View, where Google is headquartered, and away from London, where DeepMind was originally founded. Losing Hassabis as a CEO and not getting a new one, they said, also means the lab is being somewhat absorbed into the rest of the company and losing some of its independence. The first engineer called it a "small step, but gradually continuing the trend." "A lot of people are quite upset by it," they said. "Both Demis exiting, and losing some of the separation from Alphabet and identity as DeepMind." For months, there had been rumors of a significant power shift to California, and concerns about the message that change would send to the London-based staff. Workers describe an ongoing "background pressure" of things moving to Mountain View and several prominent London-based engineers, including AlphaFold veterans John Jumper, Jonas Adler, and Alexander Pritzel, recently exited the company to join Anthropic. The company had also been slowly moving reporting lines away from Hassabis for a while, according to the second engineer. A Google spokesperson disputed the characterization that power was shifting to Mountain View and said Google DeepMind remained committed to its London presence. The spokesperson said Hassabis, along with much of Google DeepMind's leadership, would remain based in the London office. They added that DeepMind would retain separate leadership and research autonomy under Kavukcuoglu. From a commercial perspective, there may be an argument that things need to change, especially if the company is having issues shipping models in an increasingly competitive environment. Mountain View may well have run out of patience and want a tighter grip on its AI crown jewel. "It's very clear that they're having a big internal debacle," the second engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said. "This might have also contributed to speeding up some of these power shifts. Generally in Google, when something is significantly underperforming or not working, their solution is to just do a huge reorg, a reallocation of compute and priorities to try and fix it." DeepMind's journey This isn't the first time Google has hit a stumbling block on its AI journey. Back in late 2022, the company famously declared a "code-red" following the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, fearing the impact on its core search business. Since then, its race to catch up has been somewhat successful. Its Gemini 3 model outperformed all its rivals and pushed OpenAI to declare its own "code-red" in late 2025, as Gemini's benchmark gains and rapid user growth put pressure on ChatGPT's lead. But since then, things appear to have gone in the wrong direction. Google's models are currently not competitive with the bleeding edge of the U.S. frontier on intelligence and coding benchmarks. Even some open-source Chinese efforts are also outshining the tech giant. Gemini 3.5 Pro was supposed to be Google's next big answer to advanced models such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT 5.6. Unveiled at the company's flagship I/O conference in May with a promise to ship "next month," it missed that June target and another mid-July date. The company headed into August with the model still unreleased, even as Google shipped a trio of smaller Flash models around it and claimed it had already begun training Gemini 4. Micah Hill-Smith, co-founder and CEO of independent benchmarking company Artificial Analysis, told Fortune that Gemini 3.6 Flash, the strongest model Google has shipped, now sits behind models from Anthropic, OpenAI, one or two leading Chinese labs, xAI, and Meta on his firm's intelligence index, which measures overall performance of AI models. "For a brief moment, we actually did have [Google's] model on top as the smartest model in the world. Right now, it's fair to say that [model] from Google is less compelling," he said. Many of the mistakes that led to this started last summer, when the company failed to prioritize the development of Gemini's coding abilities, according to a third engineer. Google, they said, was preoccupied with protecting its search traffic and beating OpenAI on chat, while rivals were running ahead on agentic and coding capabilities. Google models now significantly lag rivals on coding agent benchmarks, according to Hill-Smith. A Google spokesperson said Gemini 3.5 Pro was currently in testing and that the DeepMind team was already working on its next generation of models. The spokesperson acknowledged that the company needed to improve in coding and agentic capabilities, but said its teams were focused on that work. Google perhaps failed to predict that coding abilities would play such a major role in consumer products just a year later. Developer tools such as Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex, are now underpinning a new wave of consumer and general-use products. They include Anthropic's Cowork -- an agentic tool built on the same underlying technology as Claude Code that lets non-developers hand off multi-step knowledge work, like organizing files or drafting documents, rather than writing code -- and OpenAI's superapp, positioned as a one-stop entry point for AI tools. "They dropped the ball a little bit [on coding]," the third DeepMind engineer said. "By the time you realize something like that...a number of months have passed, and now you have to play catch-up. Then it also becomes political." Coding is now in "big focus" inside the lab, the second engineer added. However, not winning on pure model performance doesn't mean Google is down and out of the AI race. The company has other advantages such as vertical integration -- at the application, cloud, and chip layers -- that are structural advantages that can offset weaker performance at the cutting edge of raw model intelligence. "For OpenAI and Anthropic, because the model layer is so important to what they do, it's pretty existential for them to win there," Hill-Smith said. "Google could end up doing very well in the AI race overall, even if they're not at the frontier of the model layer," he said, adding that the company's unusually deep vertical integration is a structural advantage that could well offset weaker performance at the cutting edge of raw model intelligence. Falling behind -- and jumping ship The technical difficulties and feeling of playing catch-up twice in less than five years have been a knock to morale, all the current and former DeepMind workers who spoke to Fortune say. That internal frustration has coincided with one of the most damaging stretches of departures in DeepMind's history. In a single week in June, Google lost Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate and AlphaFold co-inventor John Jumper to Anthropic. The employees who spoke to Fortune describe the exits as driven by overlapping forces: aggressive poaching from cash-flush rivals, frustration at being behind in the AI race, and engineers racing to get into a pre-IPO lab before they go public, hoping the equity compensation will make them fabulously rich. "There's a lot of just hopping over to pre-IPO labs," one employee said. A Google spokesperson said talent moved regularly between technology companies and that Google remained focused on attracting people aligned with DeepMind's mission. Google has tried to combat some of the exodus, with the second engineer describing big retention and equity bonuses being deployed for some staff, and a prior round of enhanced compensation during a period when Meta was making aggressive counteroffers to AI researchers. However, employees say, it hasn't been enough to offset a deeper problem of burnout. "I've been pushing 60-hour weeks for quite a long time because there is so much to do," the third engineer said. "People are pushing themselves really hard because it is a race, and you have this feeling that you need to catch up... [but] telling people to work 60-hour weeks constantly and that it is constant crunch time usually doesn't work that well, and people do burn out." Google said AI was an intensely competitive field and pointed to researchers who had publicly expressed excitement about their work and the company's direction. Employees had issues with leadership too. Even before his exit, workers described Hassabis as absent, especially compared to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who came out of retirement to help the company's AI efforts. "You will see Sergey being incredibly hands-on, working hard on stuff and being involved," the third DeepMind engineer said. "I can't say that I've ever seen Demis walk around the office in the Gemini area." "Demis isn't a very inspiring leader," the former employee added. "Certainly not the way people talk about Dario [Amodei] ... Demis is more of a guy who is known but not seen." A union battle and contentious defense deals Frustration over the leadership and talent exodus has collided with a separate, more politically charged fight over Google's defense work. In April 2026, Google signed a deal with the Pentagon allowing the Department of Defense to use Gemini models on classified networks for any lawful government purpose. More than 580 Google employees, including senior DeepMind researchers, later signed an open letter urging Pichai to reconsider the deal, citing concerns around autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Google was not alone in making the controversial deal: OpenAI, xAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and others signed similar classified-use deals. Anthropic was the only outlier, declining to drop its own restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance -- a stance that led the Pentagon to designate the company a supply-chain risk and order the military to stop using its products. At Google, the Pentagon deal reopened a longer-running fight over the company's defense and intelligence contracts. Employees have also taken issue with Project Nimbus, a roughly $1.2 billion cloud-computing agreement Google and Amazon struck with the Israeli government in 2021. For many employees, the Pentagon deal slipped largely under the radar. But for others it was existential. Alex Turner, who spent more than two years on DeepMind's AI safety team, resigned in June citing the Pentagon deal as the trigger. In a public post, he said that his decision followed months of internal advocacy that went nowhere: he even tried to enlist Google chief scientist Dean as an ally. Andreas Kirsch, another DeepMind research scientist, was also a vocal public critic of the deal. Kirsch posted publicly at the time that the contract's restrictions amounted to little more than "meaningless weasel words" for PR purposes, and said he felt "incredibly ashamed" to be associated with the lab over the decision. The Pentagon deal was the final straw for a group of London-based DeepMinders, who launched a union bid in May in an attempt to win back some of their waning leverage. The action is the first formal attempt by a frontier AI lab to unionize. The union drive really traces back to February 2025, when Google removed language from its public AI Principles committing not to build AI for weapons or surveillance that violates international norms. The decision angered many engineers who felt Google was backtracking on its ethical assurances. The company adopted that pledge in 2018 after the intense backlash over Project Maven -- a separate defense contract. Google has declined to voluntarily recognize the union, instead offering talks through the UK's conciliation service, ACAS. The two sides have already clashed over basic questions, like which staff should be included in the bargaining unit, a person familiar with the situation said. Now employees worry that American leadership may be less inclined to play nice in negotiations. A Google spokesperson said the company was still in the early stages of the union process and would continue to engage in negotiations in good faith. DeepMind's uncertain future With Hassabis stepping back and Dean gone, DeepMind appears to be entering a new phase at precisely the moment it can least afford further disruption. While the lab still has advantages few rivals can match -- distribution, cloud business, custom chips, vast research bench, and the ability to embed AI across products used by billions -- the reorganization seems to remove a layer between DeepMind and a parent company increasingly focused on turning AI research into commercial -- and government -- deployments. For employees, the question is whether new leadership and tighter integration will bring the urgency and clearer direction DeepMind needs to close the gap in coding and agents, or deepen the problems already driving people out: burnout, weakened autonomy, and concerns over how the company will use its technology. Just four years after Google's first AI "code red," DeepMind is again trying to prove it can move fast enough to keep pace. But this time, it will be doing so without the two figures most closely associated with its scientific identity.

Google DeepMind Reshuffles After CEO Demis Hassabis Steps Aside

Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of Google's artificial intelligence division DeepMind, is stepping aside to a more advisory role, Google announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will become DeepMind's chair, and take a new role as chief scientist at Google parent Alphabet. The move comes alongside a broader restructuring of Google DeepMind, according to multiple people familiar with the changes, as Google attempts to catch up to industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic. In a note to staff, Hassabis said he believed that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is "close at hand" and said he had decided to switch roles "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." Although the news shocked the AI industry, some DeepMind employees suggested it made sense. Hassabis had spent less time on Gemini, Google's struggling frontier AI model, in recent months, according to two people with knowledge of his focus, and was spending more time on questions of safety and what the arrival of AGI would mean for society. Other changes are accompanying his move. Lila Ibrahim, DeepMind's Chief AI Readiness Officer, will now report to James Manyika, a senior Google executive, according to four people with knowledge of the personnel changes. Some of the teams that previously reported to her, including some safety teams, will now report to Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, one of these people said, though two others warned that no decision has yet been finalized. One DeepMind employee told TIME they were worried that if teams focused on safety, responsibility and ethics were moved from DeepMind into Google, they may lose their influence. Comms, legal and marketing teams from DeepMind will merge with those within Google, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Shane Legg, a DeepMind cofounder and its chief AGI scientist, will continue reporting to Hassabis, along with a wider team, according to the same person. (Google did not provide comment for this article by the time of publication.) Hassabis' departure comes at a time when Gemini has faced repeated delays, and fallen behind models from OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier. Google is also losing top talent at a rapid pace. On Wednesday its longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean announced he was leaving with several colleagues to launch a startup. John Jumper, a scientist who shared a Nobel Prize with Hassabis for AI protein structure prediction, left DeepMind earlier this year to join Anthropic, among other high-profile departures. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer, will replace Hassabis at the helm of DeepMind, though in a senior vice president position rather than as CEO, Google boss Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo on Wednesday. Kavukcuoglu had been taking responsibility for the development of Gemini long before Wednesday's news. In company briefings, Kavukcuoglu would lead Gemini discussions, and Hassabis had been absent from many day-to-day meetings about Gemini, attending only for the most significant ones, one DeepMind employee tells TIME. Meanwhile, Hassabis was regularly present for meetings about post-AGI readiness, safety, and AI governance, the person said, and was spending more of his time working with governments, including attending the recent G7 summit. Semafor earlier reported that Hassabis had been shifting day-to-day responsibility for Gemini and Google's consumer AI strategy to Kavukcuoglu for at least a year. Hassabis was not pushed to change roles, the outlet reported, but had struggled to gain satisfaction from a role more focused on business than his main passion, science.

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.

Google is expanding its AI empire -- and losing the people who built it

Google Cloud's 82% growth in the second quarter strengthens the case for prioritizing infrastructure, efficient models and enterprise AI services. Depending on where you sit, Google either has the most enviable position in artificial intelligence or is bleeding top talent to leading AI labs and other startups on the frontline of innovation. It's a contrast that's been on full display over the past two weeks, beginning with the company reporting 82% revenue growth in its cloud division, followed by a shakeup on Wednesday in Google's AI organization, as chief scientist Jeff Dean announced his departure after 27 years. For Google, home to the famous 2017 transformer paper that paved the way for the generative AI boom, the recent events underscore a central challenge facing the $4 trillion company: where to invest. Building frontier models requires huge upfront costs for compute and research with no guarantee of future returns, while the cloud business is proving to be highly efficient and is growing much faster than rival offerings at Amazon and Microsoft. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on last month's earnings call that 90% of Fortune 100 companies are using Gemini Enterprise, underscoring the company's ability to sell AI services to cloud customers. Tomasz Tunguz, founder of Theory ventures, said it's becoming clear that top-of-the-line models aren't required when it comes to meeting most enterprise demand. "I think we are at that place with AI, particularly for a lot of white-collar work, where many of the models that are reasonable are good enough," Tunguz said. "The next evolution of models are likely to be helpful in domains where you have really fancy computers." Google's full-stack approach to AI is a big reason the stock is up 16% this year after jumping 65% in 2025, when it outpaced all of its megacap peers. It's been a bumpier road of late. Alphabet shares fell after the latest earnings report due to concerns about capital expenditures, and dipped further on Wednesday following the announcement that Dean is departing and Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become chairman of the unit. While the tone on Wall Street has been generally favorable, not everyone is celebrating inside of Google. Some researchers have grown frustrated over access to the computing capacity they need to pursue ambitious projects while watching Google Cloud sell TPUs to outside customers, including Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Tensor processing units, or TPUs, are the the company's homegrown AI chips that compete with Nvidia's graphics processing units. Google's bureaucracy is a common source of frustration, with layers of approval required to move research into products. That can make emerging companies like OpenAI, Anthropic or even younger startups more appealing, especially for AI researchers and developers who prefer lab work to balance sheets. Dean is leaving along with Google stars Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le to start Discovery Loop. On X, Dean said the startup, backed by Google, will be a public benefit corporation "whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress." Their exit follows the departures of other prominent researchers, including Noam Shazeer, one of the authors of the landmark 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which provided the foundation for generative AI. All eight authors have now left Google. Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than two years after Google paid nearly $3 billion to bring him back through an acquihire. His exit came shortly before Nobel laureate John Jumper left DeepMind for Anthropic. Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, said there's a clear trend when looking at the exodus of top talent. "They're not interested in commercializing AI," said Luria, who recommends holding Alphabet stock. "They're interested in being part of history, and so they look at Anthropic, OpenAI or another startup as being the place where they can pursue history." At Google, Dean was one of the very few high-profile voices willing to criticize the Trump administration, and earlier this year he was vocal in opposing the Pentagon's decision to designate Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, warning that the move could damage the broader U.S. AI industry. More importantly, from a technical perspective, he helped build the computing infrastructure and neural network systems that established the company as an early leader in modern AI. Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, is becoming chairman of the division and will assume the newly created role of chief scientist at Alphabet, focusing on longer-term research and the societal implications of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. He also plans to devote more time to Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug-discovery company that grew out of DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's technology chief and Alphabet's chief AI architect, will take over daily management of the division and development of the next Gemini model. According to a person close to the DeepMind team, Kavukcuoglu had been taking on a broader set of responsibilities from Hassabis over the past year, including directing model development and presenting major Gemini releases. Hassabis, meanwhile, has been spending more time away from the lab, focusing on regulation and the longer-term implications of advanced AI. One of the biggest points of friction inside Google is compute. Google is investing more than almost any company in the world in data centers, chips and related infrastructure. But capacity remains scarce. Every TPU assigned to training a model, serving a Google product, or fulfilling a contract with a cloud customer reflects a choice among competing priorities. Frustrations over access to compute can be especially acute when Google announces large infrastructure commitments to competing labs like Anthropic, whose models compete directly with Gemini, sources with knowledge of the matter said. One of the people said Google has projections for demand in different areas, including research and model training, serving products such as search and Gemini, and working with cloud customers. Those requirements are modeled years in advance, the person said, though capacity may shift over shorter periods if a product grows faster than expected or if priorities change. Pichai has said on the past two earnings calls that Google continues to prioritize DeepMind's compute needs even as demand from cloud customers grows. Asked in July about TPU allocation, he said Google's "first priority" is securing the compute needed to compete at the frontier in AGI development, calling that work "the foundation for everything we do." Pichai went on to say that Google balances that need against the capacity required to run its consumer products and AI models, while increasingly placing TPUs directly in third-party data centers to help satisfy external demand. Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management and a Google shareholder, said access to compute is a natural source of tension. "Google has all of these other businesses, and they've got to figure out who they're going to give some of these resources to," Niles said. "Somebody's always going to be unhappy in that situation." In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Hassabis and Kurian appeared onstage together to discuss enterprise products and use cases. It was a striking sight considering how separately the two organizations have historically operated and how far removed Hassabis was from much of the company, according to a person familiar with Google Cloud's operations who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly on the matter. The person viewed the joint appearance as a sign that Hassabis was becoming more engaged with enterprise use cases of Google's AI, particularly in areas such as coding and customer service, and reflected a broader effort to bring the company's research and commercial operations closer together as it competes with OpenAI and Anthropic. In the months that followed, Google ran into a number of snags with its models, most notably delaying the launch of its newest flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro. At the same time, Kurian's business has seen its most explosive growth on record. Kurian, a former top Oracle executive, has led Google Cloud since 2019, building a bustling enterprise sales organization at a company known for its dominance in consumer internet. Google Cloud designs its own AI chips, operates a global data center network, and sells models, databases, security software, and tools for building AI agents. The strategy gives Google multiple ways to profit from AI demand. It can sell infrastructure to OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs, while offering Gemini to enterprises and integrating AI across Search, YouTube, Workspace and its other products. The emerging question, almost four years into the generative AI craze, is whether Google needs to develop the best AI models or if it's better off letting other companies foot the bill. Kavukcuoglu told CNBC at the company's developer conference in May that Google aims to push the frontier while also improving efficiency. He said the company's Flash model delivers frontier-level capabilities while running four times faster and more efficiently than comparable models, allowing Google to extend advanced AI across enterprise and consumer services. Like Tunguz, Niles said the most powerful model is unnecessary for many commercial applications. "The models are good enough for 90% of what needs to get done," he said. "You don't need a Ferrari for this stuff. A Ford will work for 90% of the use cases." But for the scientists and researchers trying to produce the next transformer-scale breakthrough, being good enough isn't always good enough. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

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-parent Alphabet shakes up AI division

San Francisco (United States) (AFP) - Google's head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet's chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer's departure. Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. The change "will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease," Hassabis wrote in a social media post. Isomorphic Labs is an AI-powered drug discovery lab that spun out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. As part of the shake up, DeepMind's chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division's senior vice president and oversee its operations including the development of Google's flagship frontier models and products which are known as Gemini. Longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean is also leaving the company after nearly three decades to "try something new, and we're excited to support him in that," Google CEO Sundar Pichair said in a blog post announcing the news. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for $650 million, according to reports at the time. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently the chief of Microsoft's AI segment. Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China. The industry is also chasing a theoretical milestone known as advanced general intelligence (AGI), which is a point when AI software matches the capabilities of human thinking. "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 Wednesday's blog post. "With this backdrop, I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at (Google DeepMind), so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come," Hassabis continued. Observers have been waiting for Google to announce a more powerful version of its AI model, called Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears to be delayed. Its shares closed 4 percent down Wednesday afternoon. The leadership changes come amid a wider brain drain at Google. In June, a top AI and engineering executive, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI, while senior researcher John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumped to Anthropic.

Big shake-up in Google's AI team as DeepMind chief executive steps down

Two other senior engineers are leaving the company to launch a startup, amid fears Google is falling behind in the AI race Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind, in a leadership overhaul of the UK-based AI research lab. Hassabis, a Nobel prize recipient, is leaving his main managerial role to become chair of DeepMind - as well as taking on the new position of chief scientist at Alphabet, which is also Google's parent company. DeepMind will now be led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, its chief technology officer, under the title of senior vice-president. Hassabis, a London-born 50-year-old, has been a totemic figure in AI's breakthrough era, co-founding DeepMind in 2010 and selling it for £400m to Google four years later. His efforts led to him winning the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for breakthroughs in predicting and designing the structure of proteins, via DeepMind's AlphaFold model. Shares in Alphabet, a $4.4tn (£3.3tn) company and a leading player in the AI race, closed down 4% on Wednesday. Hassabis said on Wednesday he had been working towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) - a theoretical state where a system can match a human at any cognitive task - and felt it was "close at hand". Adding it was critical to ensure the achievement of AGI "goes well for humanity", he said: "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." As befits a Nobel winner, Hassabis has played the more thoughtful, statesmanlike role in the AI industry in recent years. Last month he called on the US to establish a global AI watchdog to monitor the world's most powerful models. "What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilisation unfolds," he wrote on Substack. "By safely stewarding AGI into the world, we can enter a new golden age of scientific discovery and progress, and usher in a bright future of incredible human flourishing." Hassabis will also remain as chief executive of Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind. Several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, are departing the company, Google said. He and Sanjay Ghemawat, another leading engineer, are leaving the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. Some investors are concerned that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which hired a leading Google AI employee this summer. Both have made advances in creating coding agents.

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.

Top Google minds quit to build AI that accelerates research

Discovery Loop wants to advance the pace of scientific discovery using AI to address issues across domains. Chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving Google after a 27 year-long stint to start a new company called Discovery Loop that wants to accelerate research using AI. Alphabet and Radical Ventures are backing the business as founding investors alongside funding from Khosla Ventures. The founding team at Discovery Loop also includes Dean's other departing colleagues; senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, research vice-president at DeepMind Oriol Vinyals and research scientist Quoc Le. Together, they have helped develop multiple generations of core Google products, including Search, Ads, Translate, Tensor Processing Units, DeepMind's life sciences model AlphaFold and Gemini AI among several more technologies, and represent three of the most-cited AI researchers. The four want to begin by focusing on automating the process of machine learning (ML) research and engineering. "Historically, scientific progress has relied on these sequential human iterations. In many domains, this process remains incredibly slow and labour-intensive," Discovery Loop's website reads. "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." It plans to experiment the technology on its own systems before expanding into other scientific domains, with the hopes of developing AI systems capable of drug development or addressing environmental crises. "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," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "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." Alphabet stocks dipped more than 4pc at market close yesterday (5 August). The departures mark a continuation of a years-long shakeup in the tech industry, with top minds from Meta, Amazon, Apple, Arm, and more, exchanging hands or launching their own R&D-focused AI ventures. For Google, the latest exits comes after parent company Alphabet posted a better-than-expected revenue of $119.8bn driven by an 82pc growth in its cloud business. The company's big budget expenses seem to be working, according to Pichai, who told investors at last month's earnings call that 90pc of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise. The Gemini App now has more than 950m monthly users. The company announced a further $15bn in capital expenditures for the year on the heels of its successful quarter. CNBC reported that Google is investing more than almost any company in the world in data centres, chips and related infrastructure. Alphabet had initially announced a 2026 capex of up to $185bn, doubling expenses since last year to meet customer demand. This number was revised to $190 in April, before estimations were further raised to now hit $205bn. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Google reveals big shake up in its AI teams as Jeff Dean leaves and Demis Hassabis moves upstairs

Google LLC is reshuffling its senior artificial intelligence team, with its Chief Scientist Jeff Dean leaving the company after 27 years and Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google Deepmind, moving upstairs into a chairman role. He's also becoming the new Chief Scientist of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. The changes were announced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post, and caused Alphabet's stock to decline more than 4% today. According to Pichai, Dean (pictured) is departing Google to launch his own company together with senior Google fellow Sanjay Ghemawat. They're both leaving on good terms, he said, and Google is investing in their new startup. "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 said in the post. He said little about the nature of Dean and Gemawat's startup, except that they're trying to "accelerate discoveries" in machine learning, engineering and science. Meanwhile, Google DeepMind will now be led by its Chief Technology Officer Koray Kavuckuoglu, who is being promoted to head of the AI unit. The changes come at a time when Google is trying to stay ahead of an increasingly competitive AI industry, where it competes with Anthropic PBC, OpenAI Group PBC and others in a race to develop more sophisticated frontier models. Kavuckuoglu, who will report directly to Pichai, is currently leading the development of Google's next-generation Gemini 4 model. Google is simultaneously pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the infrastructure needed to run both its own, and its customer's AI models. In its most recent earnings report, Alphabet said it became cash flow negative for the first time ever due to its massive capital expenditures. Hassabis was one of the co-founders of DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014. Since that time, he has been at the forefront of virtually all of the company's work in AI. "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," he said in a post on X. Moving forward, Hassabis will work with Pichai on strategic and global issues relating to AI, he added. Dean later announced the name of his new startup in a post on X, saying that it's called Discovery Loop. It's focused on AI for science and engineering, and it's going to be set up as a public benefit corporation, similar to Anthropic and OpenAI.

Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO, plus more Google leadership changes

Major leadership changes were announced at Google Wednesday. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a memo that Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis will take on a newly created role as the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company built off of DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's chief technology officer, will become Google's senior vice president of DeepMind, while remaining in his separate role as Google's chief AI architect. In a separate memo, Hassabis explained that his new role would allow him to "focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come." Hassabis has predicted that artificial general intelligence, or AI that can match or beat human skills, could be achieved by 2030. "[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," Pichai said. "It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it."

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.

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.

Demis Hassabis to step down as Google DeepMind CEO

Google DeepMind Chief Executive Demis Hassabis is stepping down and will become chairman of the AI unit while remaining at the company. Hassabis, a co-founder who has led DeepMind since 2010, will also take the title of chief scientist at Alphabet and will continue to run pharmaceutical spinoff Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently chief technology officer at Google DeepMind, will become senior vice president and report directly to Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, taking over day-to-day operations. The leadership change comes alongside the departure of Alphabet chief scientist Jeff Dean, who is leaving to start a new company called Discovery Loop. Google is investing an unspecified amount in Discovery Loop and will also serve as the startup's cloud provider. Discovery Loop will focus on building AI models that can improve themselves with little or no human help. "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. DeepMind has not previously operated with a corporate chairman separate from its executive leadership. Google's AI division has also made changes to its AlphaFold group. The company recently disbanded the team, and some employees were reassigned while others left. AlphaFold is an AI system that predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins from amino acid sequences in minutes, a process that previously took years. The technology is being used to develop therapies for neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Work tied to AlphaFold also received a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Google has also said it plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic. That includes a $10 billion investment made in April and a further $30 billion tied to performance milestones.

Google AI veterans depart in seismic leadership shift

Alphabet's Google is losing some of its most prominent artificial intelligence veterans in a seismic overhaul that is casting doubt over leadership of a critical area of growth right as competition intensifies. Alphabet shares fell as much as 5.5 per cent on the news. Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee central to the development of the company's AI strategy, is departing to launch a startup, taking several high-profile employees with him. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, is moving to a chairman role at the lab.

DeepMind's CEO Job Just Disappeared. Demis Hassabis Shows What Succession Can Look Like

Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and he's been at the helm ever since. That's why it was so surprising that last Wednesday he stepped away and chose to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist at Alphabet. Hassabis told his team that he had made the decision to step back because he wanted the time and space to focus on the bigger picture and help shape the future. He also told them that he believes artificial general intelligence is "close at hand." Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer and chief AI architect, will now oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. He's been at DeepMind for 13 years. But here's what's interesting: he didn't replace Hassabis as CEO. That position was completely dissolved. He took on the position of Senior Vice President. Hassabis stepped away to step into something better TIME's Billy Perrigo recently reported that Kavukcuoglu has been carrying responsibility for Gemini's development long before the announcement on Wednesday.

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.

Inside the Google executive moves that led to its big AI reshuffle

On August 5, the Mountain View, California, tech giant announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its Google DeepMind AI division in which its chief, Demis Hassabis, stepped aside in favor of his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. Hassabis became chair, with fewer management obligations. At the same time, the two original technical co-leads of Gemini quit to co-found a startup. Google co-founder Sergey Brin in recent months has urged key AI staff to go all in on the company's Gemini model as parent Alphabet seeks to close the gap with rivals, two people familiar with his remarks told Reuters. As Anthropic raced ahead with a preview of its powerful Claude Mythos model, Brin addressed hundreds of employees in an April town hall, urging the company's Google DeepMind AI lab to move faster, said one of the people on condition of anonymity. Google's Gemini model briefly overtook competitors last November, but new updates from Anthropic and OpenAI once again put it in catch-up mode. By August, Google had delayed the new flagship version of Gemini by two months after internal testing showed its performance continued to lag behind rivals in areas such as coding, one of the sources and another person familiar with the matter said. On August 5, the Mountain View, California, tech giant announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its Google DeepMind AI division in which its chief, Demis Hassabis, stepped aside in favor of his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. Hassabis became chair, with fewer management obligations. At the same time, the two original technical co-leads of Gemini quit to co-found a startup. While some industry observers have questioned if Google is exiting the model race, interviews with seven people knowledgeable about Gemini's development efforts show that Alphabet's ⁠commercialization strategy and ⁠reorganization of ranks last week are tied to its effort to achieve model supremacy. The changes mark a further erosion of DeepMind's autonomy, which Google has chipped away at since buying the London-based lab in 2014 in an ongoing push for its AI to power more of its software and make more money. Alphabet's shakeup included a revelation during an all-hands meeting on August 6 that some teams were moving out of DeepMind and into corporate Google, two sources said. Internal meeting details and Brin's remarks have not previously been reported. Other media outlets earlier reported on not-yet-final reorganizations and Brin's coding push. Google declined to answer questions from Reuters about Brin's recent involvement, DeepMind's structural changes, and concerns held by staff. Under Hassabis, Google DeepMind pursued a wider range of AI research projects than its rivals while building Gemini models that are essential to corporate commercial interests. But in past years, Hassabis worked against some efforts that could have meant new revenue for Alphabet or helped it gain better footing in the AI race, a Reuters special report last year showed. His Google allies previously told Reuters that they rejected the idea that Hassabis gave short shrift to the business or focused too much on long-term science. In 2025, Google CEO Sundar Pichai appointed Kavukcuoglu, then DeepMind's chief technology officer, to an additional senior post as Google's chief AI architect. His task was to embed Gemini across the company's products. Four of the sources told Reuters that in the months that followed, some leaders ⁠at DeepMind found their influence diminished while Kavukcuoglu became the central figure shaping Gemini's direction. Kavukcuoglu had Brin's backing, one of them said. Leaders seek to calm worried staff News of the shakeup caused Google's stock to drop 4% the day of the announcement. At the unit-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday of last week, Hassabis and Kavukcuoglu sought to assuage concerns by staff - most of whom learned about the change as it became public - about the AI lab's future. The Google leaders said day-to-day work at the lab would remain the same, according to three ⁠sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. Kavukcuoglu would stay in charge of Gemini, the sources said; he had assumed oversight of model development more than a year prior, five sources said. Hassabis gave a talk about how AI could advance science and alter society, long-term issues that would constitute the focus of his new role as chair, the three sources knowledgeable about the meeting said. This messaging aside, the all-hands meeting surfaced fresh concerns that DeepMind's autonomy was being subsumed by Google. Hassabis and Kavukcuoglu told staff that several nontechnical teams were being moved out of DeepMind and into the corporate reporting structure, two of the sources said. For an organization that had once encouraged employees to pursue ancillary projects, the message to reclaim model supremacy was also clear. Executives including Pichai have said in recent months that Google considers itself to be at the frontier in certain areas like video generation, and remained committed to catching up in other areas despite setbacks. Senior leaders in the cloud division, meanwhile, expect Kavukcuoglu's appointment to alleviate tensions with DeepMind over allocation of Google's constrained supply of AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), another source said. Brin pushes recursive self-improvement The Google shakeup comes as Brin has worked to fire up staff, something he also did after OpenAI's ChatGPT launch in 2022 jolted Google. Although he no longer holds an executive title, the 52-year-old Brin has been informally influencing model training efforts. For several months now, he has been remarking to key staff that they need to catch up to the frontier, according to one of the sources knowledgeable about his efforts. Brin has used the implicit power he holds as Google's co-founder to push resource allocation toward specific areas, such as recursive self-improvement, the point at which the technology can improve without human intervention, this source said. Google declined to make Brin available for an interview. Hassabis, meanwhile, decreased his involvement in managing Gemini and passed off that responsibility to his deputies shortly after originally getting the AI model off the ground in 2023, two of the sources said. Though Google caught up to the frontier last November with the release of Gemini 3, it quickly fell behind again. Four sources characterized its laggard status as ⁠a result of lingering structural challenges that made it fall behind in the first place. Constraints in computing capacity, for instance, and disagreements between Gemini's many project leaders led to fewer resources for areas that would prove critical, such as coding, two of the sources said. Google's bureaucratic nature also caused it to release models at a slower pace than nimbler rivals, the four sources said. Google declined to comment on these claims, but Pichai told Wall Street analysts last month that the company would continue to scale up its infrastructure to alleviate constraints around TPUs that it needed for model training, as well as consumer and enterprise products. Power further shifts to California Against this backdrop, Kavukcuoglu has been consolidating power. He moved from London to Mountain View last year for the chief AI architect promotion, reporting to Pichai. Some London-based leaders found their influence on Gemini's technical direction had diminished in the wake of Hassabis decreasing his involvement in Gemini and Kavukcuoglu moving to Google's headquarters, according to a source with direct knowledge. Kavukcuoglu began building a reputation within other parts of Google as well, as someone more attuned to commercialization. Even before his relocation, Kavukcuoglu rather than Hassabis was the primary point of contact between DeepMind and Google Cloud, the company's main AI revenue engine, according to a source with direct knowledge. He now will have final say on major decisions for DeepMind, a Google spokesperson told Reuters last week. Some of the highest-profile leaders other than Kavukcuoglu, including Gemini's original technical co-leads Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, left as part of last week's shakeup. Staff reporting to some of these leaders had held a rare degree of agency to conduct research not directly related to training Gemini, three sources said. In the wake of their departures, Google did not immediately share plans for the fate of those teams or those projects, making some anxious that the lab's bulwark against commercial interests would further erode.

Google Just Put 1 Executive in Charge of Gemini After 8 Prominent Researchers Left in 2 Months

Demis Hassabis is giving up day-to-day control of Google DeepMind as the company puts one executive in charge of developing -- and shipping -- Gemini amid eight prominent departures in roughly two months. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday that Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, will become chair of the lab and chief scientist of Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, will become senior vice president, overseeing frontier research, Gemini model development, the Gemini app, and its developer teams. Longtime Google chief scientist Jeff Dean is also leaving after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Alphabet will become a founding investor and cloud partner in the public benefit corporation and collaborate with it on machine-learning systems. The moves divide Alphabet's AI ambitions into three lanes: Kavukcuoglu will develop and ship Gemini, Hassabis will pursue artificial general intelligence and scientific discovery inside Alphabet, and Dean's group will conduct longer-term research outside Google -- with Alphabet's money and computing power.

Google's Next AI Rival May Have Worked There Yesterday - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)

Google's latest AI leadership shake-up wasn't confined to the executive suite. After 27 years at Google, Jeff Dean announced Thursday that he is leaving to co-found DiscoLoop AI alongside fellow Google AI veterans Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le, assembling one of the most accomplished founding teams in artificial intelligence. One Week, Two Very Different Announcements Less than 24 hours later, Dean published a farewell message reflecting on nearly three decades at Google, where he watched the company grow from 25 people to more than 190,000. He said he was excited to begin a new chapter at DiscoLoop AI with longtime collaborators Ghemawat, Vinyals and Le. Those names are significant. Dean helped build much of Google's technical foundation and later became one of the company's most influential AI leaders. Ghemawat co-created foundational distributed computing systems, while Vinyals and Le were among the key researchers behind Google's modern AI efforts. The Next Wave May Come From AI Veterans Taken together, the announcements highlight a broader shift taking shape across the AI industry. Rather than simply moving between established AI labs, some of the researchers who helped build today's leading AI systems are now launching entirely new ventures of their own. Google has spent years attracting and retaining many of the world's top AI researchers. Now, an increasing number of those researchers are becoming founders themselves, taking decades of experience into startups focused on the next generation of AI applications. For investors, the timing is hard to ignore. As Alphabet reorganizes its AI leadership for what CEO Sundar Pichai called the company's "next chapter of AI momentum," one of the architects behind that momentum is already starting his next company. Whether DiscoLoop AI ultimately becomes a partner, a niche research lab or a future competitor remains to be seen, but its founding team alone ensures it will be one of the industry's most closely watched AI startups. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Google AI veterans depart during seismic leadership shift

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is losing some of its most prominent artificial intelligence veterans in a seismic overhaul that is casting doubt over leadership in a critical area of growth right as competition intensifies. Alphabet shares fell 4% on the news. Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee central to the development of the company's AI strategy, is departing to launch a startup, taking several high-profile colleagues with him. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, is moving into a chairman role at the lab. In the new structure, Hassabis will assume the dual titles of chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He is handing over operational control of the lab to Koray Kavukcuoglu, a longtime deputy, who has been promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind and will report to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the company announced Wednesday in a blog post.

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 seeking to step up AI push with DeepMind shakeup, say experts

Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis stepped down from that role on Wednesday to become its chairman. DeepMind chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu has been elevated to senior vice president to lead the AI research lab. He will oversee the development of Gemini models, frontier AI research and the Gemini app and report directly to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Google DeepMind's latest leadership shakeup is its biggest restructuring since Google Brain merged into DeepMind and is aimed at helping the company get ahead in the AI race as pressure mounts and competition intensifies, say industry experts.Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis stepped down from that role on Wednesday to become its chairman. DeepMind chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu has been elevated to senior vice president

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'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 Jeff Dean -- chief scientist for 27 years -- leaving during AI leadership overhaul for startup

Google on Wednesday revealed an overhaul of its AI leadership, as its chief scientist for nearly three decades exits - the latest in a string of high-profile departures to plague the tech giant in its struggle to pull ahead in the artificial intelligence race. Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, will become the company's chairman and chief scientist, while Google DeepMind's technology chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, will lead work on Google's new Gemini 4 model, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a post on X. Jeff Dean - Google's current chief scientist and one of the company's first employees, working there for 27 years - is leaving to start his own AI startup, Discovery Loop, with three other company veterans, according to a company blog post. Pichai said Dean is leaving the company on good terms, congratulating him for "an incredible 27-year run." Google's owner, Alphabet, will invest in Discovery Loop and provide the startup with cloud and computing capacity, Pichai added. It's just the latest exit from Google's tech leadership as the Silicon Valley giant attempts to convince investors that its massive investments in AI will pay off - especially as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude models remain firmly in the lead for the top chatbots. Noam Shazeer, a longtime Google computer scientist and leading AI researcher, recently left the company for rival OpenAI, while John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on an AlphaFold AI model, jumped ship to Anthropic. Meanwhile, Google reported that it turned cash flow negative for the first time in the most recent quarter while forecasting full-year capex of as much as $205 billion - even as it failed to share an update on the release of its newest Gemini 3.5 Pro model. Shares of Alphabet fell 4.2% Wednesday as investors fear the legacy tech company is losing steam in the AI race. "We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve," Pichai said in Wednesday's blog post. "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." Along with moving into the chairman role, Hassabis will continue running Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI drug discovery startup that was spun off from Google. Hassabis is the co-founder of DeepMind, the AI research lab that Google purchased in 2014. He has been leading Alphabet's AI divisions over the past few years. Dean's new startup, Discovery Loop, aims to automate scientific discovery, arguing the current manual process is slow and labor-intensive and can be made more efficient with the use of AI. Longtime Google workers Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat - some of the world's top scientific researchers - are joining Dean to run the new venture. Its goal is to scale this discovery automation to help advance efforts in drug discovery and world challenges like clean energy. Along with an investment from Google, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading a seed round for the new company. Alphabet has a multi-year partnership with News Corp, which owns The Post, to develop AI-related content and products.

Who wins as Jeff Dean exits Google to launch AI startup? By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Jeff Dean -- Google's 30th employee, the architect of TensorFlow, TPUs, and Google Brain -- just walked out the door to launch Discovery Loop, a public-benefit AI startup focused on automating scientific discovery. Alphabet shares fell 4.04% today to $362.38. The Magnitude of the Exit This isn't a typical executive departure. Jeff Dean didn't just lead AI at Google -- he built the foundational infrastructure that every modern AI lab runs on. His co-authors on this new venture are equally notable: * Sanjay Ghemawat -- co-inventor of MapReduce and GFS (the blueprints for modern distributed computing) * Oriol Vinyals -- AlphaStar, sequence-to-sequence learning pioneer * Quoc Le -- invented neural architecture search, key Gemini contributor When four engineers of this caliber leave together, it's not a sabbatical -- it's a signal that the most compelling AI frontier has shifted. The Leadership Reshuffling Ripple The departure triggered a simultaneous restructuring at Google DeepMind that markets clearly didn't welcome: Two of Google's top AI minds moving away from operations simultaneously -- mid-AI-race -- is the kind of distraction competitors welcome. Who Wins Today? The obvious beneficiaries: NVIDIA (NVDA): Trading at $219.23 (+3.44% today) -- the AI infrastructure arms dealer benefits from any fragmentation of the AI landscape. More players = more GPU demand. Microsoft (MSFT): $487.46 (-1.09%) -- its OpenAI partnership means every Google leadership distraction is a window for Copilot and Azure AI to consolidate enterprise share. Meta Platforms (META): $588.91 (+0.17%) -- Zuckerberg's open-source Llama strategy benefits when Google's internal cohesion is questioned. The Nuanced Google Bear Case * Brain drain risk is real: Dean's departure may embolden other senior researchers to exit. Google has ~950M monthly Gemini users -- substantial, but leadership instability at the frontier research level could slow next-generation model development. * Alphabet still backed Discovery Loop as a founding investor alongside Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures -- a calculated hedge, but also an acknowledgment that Dean's best work may now happen outside the Googleplex. * The stock was already under pressure from a $205B spending commitment announced recently -- today's -4% drop layered a talent concern narrative on top of a capital discipline concern. The Contrarian Bull Case * Hassabis shifting fully to AGI strategy (unencumbered by day-to-day ops) could be a net positive -- the DeepMind founder in pure research mode is formidable. * Kavukcuoglu is a 13-year DeepMind veteran with deep Gemini continuity -- this isn't a vacuum, it's a succession. * Gemini at 950M monthly users and Gemma at 900M downloads are products with substantial momentum. Discovery Loop: The Dark Horse The startup's focus on automating scientific discovery (drug design, materials science, physics) targets a market with potentially greater long-term value than chatbots. With Alphabet as both investor and cloud partner, Discovery Loop gets runway and infrastructure while Dean retains the freedom to operate at the frontier. The next AlphaFold-level breakthrough may come from here. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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 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-parent Alphabet shakes up AI division

Google's head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet's chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer's departure. Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. The change "will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease," Hassabis wrote in a social media post. Isomorphic Labs is an AI-powered drug discovery lab that spun out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. As part of the shake up, DeepMind's chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division's senior vice president and oversee its operations including the development of Google's flagship frontier models and products which are known as Gemini. Longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean is also leaving the company after nearly three decades to "try something new, and we're excited to support him in that," Google CEO Sundar Pichair said in a blog post announcing the news. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for US$650 million, according to reports at the time. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently the chief of Microsoft's AI segment. Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China. The industry is also chasing a theoretical milestone known as advanced general intelligence (AGI), which is a point when AI software matches the capabilities of human thinking. "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 Wednesday's blog post. "With this backdrop, I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at (Google DeepMind), so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come," Hassabis continued. Observers have been waiting for Google to announce a more powerful version of its AI model, called Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears to be delayed. Its shares closed 4% down Wednesday afternoon. The leadership changes come amid a wider brain drain at Google. In June, a top AI and engineering executive, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI, while senior researcher John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumped to Anthropic.

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)

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis steps down: Here is what he will do now

Pichai said the move will allow Hassabis to focus on the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and scientific research. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced a major AI leadership change. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO and taking on a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. Pichai said the move will allow Hassabis to focus on the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and scientific research. On the other hand, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who has been serving as Google DeepMind's Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Architect, will become Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind. Explaining the decision, Pichai said this is an important moment for AI development. He said Hassabis has spent years working toward AGI and is the right person to help guide its future. "This is truly his life's work and purpose," Pichai wrote in a message to employees. Also read: After OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta reveals its AI model hacked another company during testing Hassabis also shared why he decided to step back from running Google DeepMind every day. He said he wants more time to focus on the bigger picture as AI continues to advance. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis said. "With this backdrop, 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." Also read: Elon Musk says OpenAI cannot be trusted as Apple seeks court injunction in trade secrets lawsuit In his new position, Hassabis will work closely with Sundar Pichai on long-term AGI strategy. He will also continue advising Google DeepMind's teams while remaining leading Isomorphic Labs. Hassabis said he plans to spend more time helping Isomorphic Labs move faster in its mission. According to him, AI should play a major role in improving healthcare. " I've always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. 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," he said Also read: OpenAI finds more AI agent escape incidents as it expands hacking probe: Report Meanwhile, Koray Kavukcuoglu will take charge of Google DeepMind's daily operations. Pichai said Koray has been with DeepMind for more than 13 years and has played a key role in several major AI breakthroughs. Hassabis also expressed confidence in the new leadership, saying the Gemini models are "in good hands." Pichai also announced that longtime Google executive Jeff Dean will leave after 27 years to launch a new public benefit company with Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat. Alphabet will continue working with the new company as an investor and cloud partner.