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10h ago

Google Reorders AI Leadership as Hassabis Shifts to Alphabet Chief Scientist

It separates long-term AGI research from day-to-day Gemini development, placing product responsibility under Sundar Pichai.

DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.
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
Jeff Dean, head of artificial intelligence at Google LLC, speaks during a Google AI event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020. "AI is one of the most profound things we're working on as humanity. It's more profound than fire or electricity," Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichaisaid in an interview at the World Economic Forum. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Overview

  • The reorganization, announced Wednesday, Aug. 5, moves Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind CEO into the newly created role of Alphabet chief scientist and chair of DeepMind so he can focus on AGI strategy and scientific applications.
  • Koray Kavukcuoglu is promoted to senior vice president to run Google DeepMind’s daily operations and will report to CEO Sundar Pichai with explicit oversight of Gemini model development.
  • Longtime engineer Jeff Dean and researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le left Google to form Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that Alphabet will fund as a founding investor and support as cloud partner.
  • The changes come as Google’s flagship Gemini upgrade remains unreleased after a planned June launch and investors reacted by sending Alphabet shares down roughly 4–5% on the news.
  • The split centralizes more AI authority in Mountain View, sharpens the trade-off between long-horizon research and product velocity, and could affect hiring, developer momentum, and the pace of Gemini rollouts.