Overview
- On Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026, Alphabet announced that Demis Hassabis will step back from daily DeepMind duties to become Alphabet chief scientist and DeepMind chair while Koray Kavukcuoglu assumes day-to-day leadership and several senior engineers including Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le left to launch Discovery Loop.
- The departing team formed Discovery Loop as a public benefit corporation to build automated 'experiment loops' that run large numbers of tests to speed discoveries in machine learning, biology, chip design and other fields.
- Google has invested in Discovery Loop and agreed a Google Cloud compute partnership for the startup’s first year, and the new company has also raised venture backing from firms including Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures.
- The reshuffle comes as Google’s flagship Gemini upgrade remains unreleased after a planned June launch, which has stoked investor worry about the company’s competitiveness and contributed to a drop in shares.
- The moves shift Alphabet toward a clearer AGI research focus while raising short-term risks for product development and talent retention, and they create a hybrid path where independent research teams can both compete with and remain tied to Google through funding and cloud deals.