Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) lab, will step down as chief executive officer (CEO). Key executives, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, Google DeepMind chief scientist who led the development of Google's AI model "Gemini," are also leaving the company.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced on the 5th (local time) an AI leadership reshuffle reflecting these changes. Hassabis will move to the role of chairman of Google DeepMind and also take on the newly created position of chief scientist at Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Hassabis's longtime aide and Google's chief AI architect, will be promoted to senior vice president and lead DeepMind.
Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in London, U.K., in 2010, continued to spearhead Google's AI development after the company was acquired by Google in 2014. In Korea, he became known as the "father of AlphaGo," the Go AI that faced Lee Sedol 9-dan in 2016 and posted four wins and one loss. He led the development of the protein structure prediction AI model "AlphaFold," and for that contribution jointly won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
In a message to employees, Hassabis said he would step back from day-to-day management to focus on the bigger picture and devote his efforts to finding the most effective ways to contribute to the advancement of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's CEO, said in a companywide memo that "Hassabis has been considering a role where he can fully focus on proactively shaping the future of AGI," adding, "this is extremely important work for Alphabet and humanity, and there is no one better suited to it than Demis."
Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, will also leave Google after 27 years to found the AI startup Discovery Loop. Google plans to participate as an investor in the startup and as its cloud infrastructure provider. Key Google executives such as Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le will also join Discovery Loop.
Major foreign media reported that Google's latest management reshuffle came as global AI competition intensified and internal pushback at Google DeepMind grew in recent weeks. In fact, core researchers, including John Jumper, Google DeepMind vice president who developed AlphaFold and jointly won the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, have recently left for rivals such as Anthropic.
Axios reported, citing anonymous sources, that development of Google's next-generation AI model "Gemini 3.5 Pro" is running months behind competitors, with one cause cited as falling morale within the organization. Originally slated for release in June, Gemini 3.5 Pro has been delayed.
Following the reorganization news, Alphabet shares fell nearly 5% intraday that day.