Google DeepMind's Hassabis becomes chairman as Jeff Dean exits for Discovery Loop

Demis Hassabis will step down from the day-to-day running of Google DeepMind to become its chairman. Staff memos published August 5 say 27-year Google veteran Jeff Dean is leaving to start a startup that Google will help fund.

Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the AlphaFold protein-structure work he led with John Jumper.

Hassabis steps back as Kavukcuoglu takes over

Hassabis is taking on two new titles, Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He is continuing to lead the company’s AI drug-discovery spinoff, Isomorphic Labs.

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote. He wanted “the time and space to focus on the big picture.”

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to AI that matches or exceeds humans across most tasks.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, until now DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect, will be senior vice president of the unit, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, and will be responsible for developing Gemini, frontier research, and the app and developer teams.

Kavukcuoglu has been at DeepMind for 13 years and was part of early breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN, Pichai’s memo said.

Pichai wrote that after “an incredible 27-year run,” Dean wants to try something new, and he’s not going alone. Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are establishing an independent public benefit corporation, called Discovery Loop, to speed up discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering.

DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le are joining too. Google will be a founding investor and cloud provider for the new company, and the two will collaborate on research into ML systems and infrastructure.

Dean said being outside a public company gives him room to chase science over quarterly returns. “We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company’s purist financial interests,” he said.

Reshuffle lands as Google races OpenAI and Anthropic

Gemini 3.5 Pro is running months behind schedule. Several senior researchers, including one of Gemini’s co-leads, have already left for rival labs.

Investors read the memos as a warning. Shares of Alphabet dropped more than 4.10% on the news, giving back some of a 13% run-up the stock had enjoyed off a post-earnings low.

The departures come just weeks after Google rolled out Gemini 3 to compete with ChatGPT, a release Hassabis publicly touted. Pichai’s memo said the Gemini app has more than 950 million monthly users

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