Alphabet split its AI leadership on Wednesday, moving Demis Hassabis from DeepMind CEO to the new role of chief scientist and chairman while four of Google’s best-known researchers left to found a startup called Discovery Loop.
Hassabis, a Nobel Prize winner who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, said he is stepping back because AGI is close. “I’ve always believed the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health,” he wrote in a staff memo, promising more time for drug discovery firm Isomorphic Labs, where he remains founder and CEO.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer, takes over day-to-day operations with the title of senior vice president. He keeps his parallel role as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are departing to build Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. Google invested in the startup, and its cloud division will supply computing capacity.
Alphabet shares fell 4% on the news. The shuffle lands while Google’s flagship Gemini model remains unreleased after a planned June launch, and as rivals keep poaching its talent. Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI in June, and Nobel laureate John Jumper moved to Anthropic the same week. Hassabis told staff the company is making “great progress” on models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4.
