Alphabet announced a sweeping change to its artificial intelligence leadership on Wednesday, naming Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis as the parent company's chief scientist and chair of DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take charge of DeepMind's daily operations as senior vice president, while prominent Google researchers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat will leave to establish an independent research company backed by Google.
The changes divide strategic science from product execution at a critical point in the global AI race. Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier research, and the Gemini application and developer teams. Hassabis will remain an adviser to those groups, continue leading AI drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, and focus on artificial general intelligence and science across Alphabet.
Google said its Gemini application has more than 950 million monthly users and that its Gemma models have exceeded 900 million downloads. The company also pointed to demand for Gemini Flash, a live cybersecurity model, recent robotics work and upcoming releases including Gemini 4 as evidence of momentum. Hassabis said he was handing over operational duties because he believes AI has reached a pivotal stage requiring attention to long-term scientific and societal questions.
The simultaneous departure of Dean and Ghemawat gives the transition added weight. Dean joined Google 27 years ago and, with Ghemawat, helped build early search infrastructure and neural-network systems that contributed to the modern AI era. Google said it will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner for their new public-benefit corporation, which will seek to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science and engineering. Axios identified the venture as Discovery Loop and reported that DeepMind researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le will also join it.
The reorganization keeps the departing scientists connected to Alphabet while giving Kavukcuoglu clearer responsibility for products and model delivery. He has worked at DeepMind for 13 years, started its deep-learning team and contributed to systems including WaveNet and DQN, according to Google. Hassabis, whose AlphaFold research contributed to his 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said he will devote more attention to scientific applications and work at Isomorphic Labs, including efforts related to major diseases.
Google presented the moves as a way to accelerate both commercial AI development and longer-term research rather than a retreat from either. The immediate test will be whether the new structure can maintain the Gemini release schedule, preserve research continuity after several senior departures and convert Alphabet's computing resources and large user base into sustained progress. Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Pichai, while Hassabis will advise company leaders on strategic and global questions surrounding advanced AI.
Comments