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4w ago

Hassabis Steps Back as Google DeepMind Is Reorganized and Top Engineers Quit

Centralizing daily AI operations under Koray Kavukcuoglu shifts Hassabis to long-term AGI strategy.

DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.
CEO of DeepMind Technologies Demis Hassabis listens during a debate at an AI summit at Imperial College London, in London, Britain, July 9, 2025. LUDOVIC MARIN/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
Jeff Dean, head of artificial intelligence at Google LLC, speaks during a Google AI event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020. "AI is one of the most profound things we're working on as humanity. It's more profound than fire or electricity," Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichaisaid in an interview at the World Economic Forum. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Overview

  • Demis Hassabis stepped down from day-to-day duties Wednesday to become Alphabet’s chief scientist and chairman of Google DeepMind so he can focus on artificial general intelligence research and lead Isomorphic Labs.
  • Koray Kavukcuoglu was named senior vice president to run Google DeepMind’s daily operations and report to CEO Sundar Pichai, a move that places operational control more firmly in Mountain View.
  • Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le left Google to found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit company that received seed backing and a cloud-compute partnership from Alphabet.
  • Investors reacted to the leadership changes and recent talent departures by pushing Alphabet shares down about 4–5 percent amid continued concern that Google has not yet released its planned flagship Gemini upgrade.
  • The reshuffle highlights a deeper tension between long-term scientific aims and product delivery at Google and could speed tighter integration between DeepMind research, Google Cloud and commercial teams while prompting more independent spinouts.