Google announced a major leadership overhaul of its AI division on August 5, with Demis Hassabis ceding his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to become the unit's chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer and Alphabet's chief AI architect for 13 years, steps up to senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai and taking over daily operations including Gemini model development. Hassabis will continue leading Isomorphic Labs, DeepMind's AI drug discovery spinoff, alongside his new roles.
The reshuffle landed the same day Jeff Dean, Google's most senior technical executive after 27 years at the company, announced he was leaving to co-found a new venture called Discovery Loop alongside fellow DeepMind researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, and longtime engineer Sanjay Ghemawat. Google will invest in the new company. Pichai framed the changes around AGI ambitions, saying "there's never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science," while Hassabis reportedly had been spending less time on Gemini, Google's flagship model, in recent months and more time on AI safety and the societal implications of AGI.
The moves come at a difficult stretch for Google's AI operations: Gemini 3.5 Pro has slipped months behind its promised schedule even as OpenAI and Anthropic have shipped models that meaningfully advance the state of the art, and several senior researchers have already left for competing labs. Alphabet shares fell roughly 5% on the news. Lila Ibrahim, DeepMind's Chief AI Readiness Officer, will now report to senior Google executive James Manyika as part of the broader restructuring.