Hassabis exits DeepMind CEO role as Jeff Dean quits Google

Alphabet made Demis Hassabis its chief scientist and handed DeepMind's daily operations to Koray Kavukcuoglu, hours before Jeff Dean announced a rival startup.

Alphabet restructured the top of its artificial intelligence organisation on Wednesday, removing Demis Hassabis from day-to-day control of Google DeepMind and losing four of its most senior researchers to a new company on the same day.

What changed

In a message to staff, Alphabet and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said Hassabis will become Alphabet's chief scientist, a newly created position, and take a chair role at Google DeepMind. Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, framed the move as handing off operational duties so he can concentrate on longer-range questions around artificial general intelligence, advise research teams and spend more time on Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's drug-discovery subsidiary.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, until now DeepMind's chief technology officer and Alphabet's chief AI architect, assumes daily management. Notably, he does so as a senior vice president reporting to Pichai rather than inheriting a standalone chief executive title — a structural change that folds the lab more tightly into Google's reporting lines. His remit covers Gemini model development, frontier research, the Gemini consumer app and the AI developer platforms.

The departures

Separately, Jeff Dean left Google after 27 years, together with senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, vice president of research at Google DeepMind and a technical lead on Gemini. The four are launching Discovery Loop, incorporated as a public benefit corporation, which says it will use large-scale compute to automate entire experimental loops in machine learning, science and engineering. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the first round, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital participating, and Radical managing partner Jordan Jacobs joining the board. Google is a founding investor and will serve as Discovery Loop's cloud partner, supplying compute for the company's first year and collaborating on a research framework for ML systems and infrastructure. The founders have not disclosed the round's size or valuation.

Why it matters

This is the most significant change to frontier-lab governance since the Gemini era began. Dean, Ghemawat, Le and Vinyals span the lineage from MapReduce and TensorFlow to sequence-to-sequence learning and the Transformer paper — talent depth no competitor can replicate quickly. Replacing a Nobel-laureate chief executive with an SVP reporting into Google, while a startup absorbs four of the lab's most cited names, points to a shift from research-led autonomy toward product-led integration. That Google is funding and hosting the departing team rather than simply losing it softens the break, but it does not change who now sets the research agenda. How Kavukcuoglu balances Gemini shipping cadence against long-horizon research will shape whether Google's AI lead holds.

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