Overview
- Google announced the changes on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, naming Demis Hassabis Chair of Google DeepMind and Alphabet Chief Scientist and appointing Koray Kavukcuoglu as SVP to run Gemini model development and Frontier AI research.
- Longtime Google figures Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat left the company to found Discovery Loop along with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, structuring the new venture as a public benefit corporation devoted to automating experimental loops for faster discovery.
- Google is a founding investor in Discovery Loop and has agreed to provide a one-year Google Cloud compute partnership for the startup’s early work, keeping a commercial and technical tie despite the departures.
- The leadership shifts come as Google faces pressure over the unreleased flagship Gemini upgrade and competitive advances from OpenAI and Anthropic while the company points to strong usage numbers such as the Gemini app’s 950 million monthly users and over 900 million Gemma downloads.
- The changes could speed Alphabet’s focus on AGI and science while concentrating operational responsibility for product timing and model releases with Kavukcuoglu, and they raise near-term risks for DeepMind’s engineering bench and longer-term questions about how startups that automate experiments will reshape research workflows.