Google has announced a sweeping leadership overhaul at its flagship AI lab, a bid to regain momentum in a race it increasingly trails OpenAI and Anthropic. Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis will step down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become the unit's chairman and take on the newly created role of Alphabet chief scientist.
Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the AlphaFold protein-folding breakthrough, will also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, Google's AI drug discovery spinoff. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer, becomes senior vice president of the unit, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai with a mandate to keep the Gemini roadmap on track. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis wrote in a memo to staff.
The most striking departure involves Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran who helped found Google Brain. Dean is leaving to start Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation in which Google will be both investor and cloud provider. He is joined by senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. In an interview with The New York Times, Dean said that outside a public company, "we might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's purest financial interests."
Markets reacted nervously: Alphabet shares fell more than 4% on the news, wiping out a rally that had recovered 13% from a post-earnings low. The shake-up comes after months of friction inside Google DeepMind, with several high-profile researchers departing for rival labs and company sources telling Axios that Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind schedule, in part because of low morale.
The reorganization refocuses Hassabis on what he calls "the big picture" — AGI strategy and scientific research — while Kavukcuoglu chases delivery velocity on the Gemini roadmap. Whether the reshuffle stabilizes a lab that has lost stars in both directions remains the open question for the coming quarters.
