Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day operations at Google DeepMind. He becomes chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist, leaving Koray Kavukcuoglu to run the unit as senior vice president. The shift comes as Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran, walks away to co-found Discovery Loop, an independent AI research shop that Google will fund.
Who leads what now
Kavukcuoglu, who spent 13 years at DeepMind building core breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN, takes over product development for Gemini, frontier research, and developer tools. He reports straight to Sundar Pichai. Hassabis keeps his hands on Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery spinoff, while positioning himself to think bigger. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis wrote. He wanted space to focus on the long game.
Why Google's losing a founding figure
Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching Discovery Loop outside the company walls. Google will invest. After nearly three decades inside, Dean wants to try something new. This matters because it signals confidence in Alphabet's AI infrastructure. The company isn't fighting talent drain by keeping Dean locked in a role. Instead, it's backing his bet on independent research, which suggests Pichai and leadership believe the frontier is moving faster outside traditional corporate structures than within them.
Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, the protein-folding breakthrough. Promoting him to chief scientist locks in that intellectual firepower at Alphabet level. Kavukcuoglu's 13-year track record means the unit doesn't lose continuity on Gemini development or core research velocity.
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