Google has announced a sweeping reshuffle of its top AI leadership, in a move that simultaneously promotes its most famous AI executive and sends one of its founding engineers out the door.
Demis Hassabis, who has led Google DeepMind for over a decade, will become the chair of Google DeepMind and Alphabet's chief scientist, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis keeps leading Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery company, and says he will continue working with Pichai on "strategic and global AGI matters". His successor is Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's former CTO, who becomes Google's SVP of DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai while remaining Google's chief AI architect.
The bigger surprise is the departure of Jeff Dean — Google's 30th employee and chief scientist of Google DeepMind — who is leaving with Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat to found Discovery Loop, an AI-focused public benefit corporation. Google will be a "founding investor" in the venture, whose stated mission is to build AI systems that can "automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering".
Hassabis framed the transition around 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." The shakeup lands as Google bets heavily on Gemini 4 in a race with OpenAI and Anthropic.
