Sir Demis Hassabis, one of the chief individuals in charge of Google’s AI strategy, is stepping down as the chief executive of Google DeepMind.

Hassabis will move into the role of chair at Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet. He will remain the chief executive of the AI drug discovery firm Isomorphic Labs.

In a blog post explaining the change Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google and Alphabet, said the move allows Hassabis to focus his attention on delivering artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term used for an AI system that meets or surpasses human cognitive capabilities.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current chief technology officer at Google DeepMind and chief AI architect at Google, will take the reins from Hassabis in the newly-created role SVP of Google DeepMind.

Pichai said Kavukcuoglu brings 13 years’ of experience at the firm to the role and will oversee development of Google’s frontier model Gemini as well as broader AI research.

Current chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the firm altogether to found Discovery Loop, a new public benefit corporation focused on machine learning, science, and engineering.

Dean’s departure marks the end of an era for Google’s AI team. The 30th employee to join Google, Dean and his team delivered breakthroughs such as the NoSQL database service Bigtable, the basis for Google’s petabyte-scale analytics workloads, as well as the AI and machine learning library TensorFlow and neural network dataflow system Pathways which has become integral for Google’s frontier training runs.

He will be joined at Discovery Loop by several prominent Google employees, including his Bigtable collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, Gemini technical lead Oriol Vinyals, and Google Translate and large language model (LLM) pioneer Quoc Le.

Alphabet shares dropped more than four per cent on the news.

The cloud and AI giant has faced some setbacks in its AI efforts in recent months. While its demand for its AI services continue to grow, with the firm saying its AI models now processing 22 billion tokens per minute, it has also repeatedly delayed the release of its new frontier model Gemini 3.5 Pro.

This was originally rumoured to launch in May, then publicly announced for a June launch date that it missed, fuelling speculation that the model is not as capable as competing models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

In Alphabet’s most recent earnings call Pichai said that Gemini 3.5 Pro was under testing, and teased Google has “started our most ambitious pre-training run yet for Gemini 4”.

At the end of July, the Financial Times reported that Google DeepMind had dismantled its AlphaFold team to refocus staff on Gemini development and teams pursuing advances in areas such as enzyme design, genomics, and nuclear fusion.

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