Alphabet reshuffles AI leadership in major shake-up: Hassabis elevated to Chief Scientist, while Jeff Dean and star researchers leave to found new company
Demis Hassabis moves from CEO of Google DeepMind to Chief Scientist of Alphabet, as veteran engineer Jeff Dean and several Gemini researchers depart to launch a new company, amid concerns over delays to the new Gemini version
Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced a major restructuring of its AI leadership on Wednesday. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind and a Nobel laureate, will step down as CEO of the unit and move into a newly created role as Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while also serving as chairman of Google DeepMind. In a memo to employees, he said the motivation behind the change is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence — AI with human-level intelligence), which he believes is fast approaching. Hassabis will also continue to oversee Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet subsidiary that uses AI for drug development.
Day-to-day operations at Google DeepMind will be handled by Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's CTO, who will take on the title of senior vice president in place of CEO, alongside his existing role as Alphabet's Chief AI Architect.
Another development that has shaken the industry is the departure of Jeff Dean, Google's legendary veteran engineer, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — all senior leaders of the Gemini team. The group is joining forces to found a new company called Discovery Loop, structured as a public benefit corporation focused on discovery in machine learning, science, and engineering.
The shake-up comes at a time when Google DeepMind is under pressure, as its latest flagship Gemini model has yet to launch despite originally being slated for a June release. This has fueled concerns among investors and industry insiders that Google may be falling behind rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which poached several prominent AI employees from Google over the past summer. Alphabet shares fell 4% immediately after the news broke.
The simultaneous loss of top-tier talent like Jeff Dean and the Gemini research team highlights the intensifying war for AI talent and could affect the development timeline of Gemini, which millions of Thai users rely on daily. It also signals that even a giant like Google is not on firm ground in the AI technology race.