Sir Demis Hassabis has announced his departure from the chief executive role at Google DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence research division. In a restructuring of the organization’s leadership, Hassabis will transition to the position of chair at DeepMind while simultaneously assuming a newly created role as chief scientist across parent company Alphabet. The AI research lab will now be overseen by Koray Kavukcuoglu, who previously served as the organization’s chief technology officer and will hold the title of senior vice-president.
Hassabis, age 50, has been a central figure throughout the artificial intelligence industry’s recent acceleration. He co-founded DeepMind in 2010 before Google acquired the company for £400 million in 2014. His contributions to the field earned him recognition through the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded for work on protein structure prediction and design through DeepMind’s AlphaFold technology. In his statement about the transition, Hassabis indicated his belief that artificial general intelligence—a theoretical capability where systems could perform any cognitive task at human level—is approaching realization.
Hassabis explained the move as necessary to provide him the opportunity to concentrate on strategic matters and broader implications for the development of advanced AI systems. He stated that ensuring the responsible achievement of AGI “goes well for humanity” represents a critical priority. Beyond his DeepMind responsibilities, Hassabis will continue serving as chief executive of Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery enterprise that separated from DeepMind.
The leadership change coincides with departures by other key personnel from the organization. Google disclosed that several engineers involved with its Gemini model development, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, are leaving to establish a startup named Discovery Loop. The new venture will concentrate on advancing machine learning research with applications to scientific and engineering challenges.
Alphabet’s stock declined 4 percent on the day of the announcement. Industry observers have noted concerns among investors that Google may be losing ground relative to competitors Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which recruited prominent Google artificial intelligence researchers during the same period. Those firms have recently demonstrated progress in developing coding agent technology.
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