Overview
- Alphabet announced the overhaul Wednesday, naming Demis Hassabis Alphabet chief scientist and chair of DeepMind and promoting Koray Kavukcuoglu to senior vice president to run daily DeepMind operations and report to CEO Sundar Pichai.
- Longtime engineers Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le left Google to start Discovery Loop, a public-benefit company that has seed backing and a cloud compute partnership with Google.
- Reports say Google’s next flagship Gemini upgrade—variously referred to in coverage as Gemini 3.5 Pro or Gemini 4—has not been released after a planned June launch, a delay that has raised investor and industry concerns about Google’s pace versus OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Markets reacted quickly, with Alphabet shares falling about 4–5% after the leadership changes and exits were disclosed.
- The reset pulls senior AI leadership into Mountain View to align model work more directly with product and Google Cloud, and it draws a clearer line between short-term commercialization pressure and Hassabis’s longer-term AGI and scientific priorities.