Major leadership changes were announced at Google Wednesday.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a memo that Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis will take on a newly created role as the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company spun off from DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will become Google’s senior vice president of DeepMind, while remaining in his separate role as Google’s chief AI architect.
In a separate memo, Hassabis explained that his new role would allow him to “focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come.” Hassabis has predicted that artificial general intelligence, or AI that can match or beat human skills, could be achieved by 2030.
“[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” Pichai said. “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.”
Hassabis, a 2024 recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold the company to Google in 2014 for about $650 million. Following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, DeepMind and Google Brain—co-founded by Jeff Dean in 2011—were merged into a new entity called Google DeepMind, of which Hassabis was appointed its CEO and Dean its chief scientist.
Dean, one of Google’s earliest employees, is also departing from his role. Alongside other senior Google colleagues, Dean is moving on to create Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating machine learning, science, and engineering. Pichai announced that Google will be a “founding investor” in the new company.
In May, at the Google I/O developer conference, Pichai said the company’s new Gemini model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, would launch “next month.” However, the model launch has since been delayed, leading to concerns among investors that the company was falling behind its competitors—who have poached top Google talent over the last few months.
In June, OpenAI poached Noam Shazeer, the vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini. Anthropic has also recently hired several top AI scientists and senior staff away from DeepMind, including AlphaFold co-creator John Jumper, who shares the Nobel Prize with Hassabis.
In an earnings call last month, Pichai pushed back on the narrative that Google was lagging behind its competitors.
“We’ve had clearly frontier models,” Pichai said. “There are many attributes on which we are still at the frontier; there are areas where we’ve acknowledged we need to improve, and coding and agentic coding is an example of that.”
