Alphabet announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its AI division on Wednesday, with Demis Hassabis stepping back from his day-to-day role as chief executive of Google DeepMind. He will become chairman of the unit and take on a new title: Alphabet‘s chief scientist.
The shakeup lands at a delicate time for Google DeepMind. The flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased, despite a planned launch in June. That delay has stoked investor and industry worries that Google is losing ground to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which hired away a star Google AI researcher this summer. Alphabet’s shares slipped 4% on the news.
In a memo to staff, Hassabis said his move is driven by the closeness of artificial general intelligence—an advanced, still-hypothetical state where computers become as smart as humans. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a companywide note that he and Hassabis have long discussed a role allowing him to focus fully on shaping the future of AGI. “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity,” Pichai said, “and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.”
Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit’s chief technology officer, will take over day-to-day responsibilities as senior vice president of the business—not CEO—while also serving as Alphabet’s chief AI architect. Hassabis, who has long prioritized research over profits, will explore strategy around AGI’s societal impacts and will have few direct reports, according to a Google spokesperson.
At the same time, some of Google’s most celebrated engineers are leaving. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le have exited to start a public benefit corporation called Discovery Loop, focused on breakthroughs in machine learning, science, and engineering. Alphabet didn’t say what prompted the departures or their coincidental timing. In his memo, Hassabis touted “great progress” on Google’s AI models, including an unreleased upgrade dubbed Gemini 4, and said he’ll spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery company he founded out of DeepMind.