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3h ago

Alphabet Reorders AI Leadership as Hassabis Becomes Chief Scientist

The move concentrates long-term AGI strategy at Alphabet and signals a new path for frontier research outside Google’s day-to-day operations.

CEO of DeepMind Technologies Demis Hassabis listens during a debate at an AI summit at Imperial College London, in London, Britain, July 9, 2025. LUDOVIC MARIN/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
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DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.
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Overview

  • On Wednesday, Demis Hassabis said he will leave day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind to become Alphabet’s chief scientist and chair of DeepMind so he can focus on AGI strategy and his work at Isomorphic Labs.
  • Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over daily operations as senior vice president, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai and overseeing Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.
  • Veteran Googlers including Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le have left to found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation that aims to automate scientific and engineering experiments.
  • Alphabet and Google Cloud are founding backers of Discovery Loop and will provide capital and cloud compute, giving the new startup technical access while letting it operate independently.
  • The announcements follow delays to Google’s flagship Gemini releases and triggered a sharp share decline, raising questions about how talent moves and separate research vehicles will affect Google’s place in the frontier AI race.