Overview
- Demis Hassabis will step down from day-to-day management of Google DeepMind to become chair of DeepMind and Alphabet’s newly created chief scientist role, a change he framed as allowing him to focus on AGI strategy and scientific applications of AI.
- Koray Kavukcuoglu will assume day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind with the title senior vice president and will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and developer teams.
- Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are leaving Google to found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation that aims to automate machine learning, science, and engineering, and Google is a founding investor and Cloud partner for the new venture.
- The leadership changes follow delays to Gemini’s planned flagship release and triggered a sharp market reaction, with Alphabet shares falling several percent after the announcement on Wednesday.
- The moves deepen a recent trend of top AI talent exits and set up a new dynamic where Google keeps commercial ties through investment and cloud compute while core frontier research may increasingly be pursued outside the company.