By SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 5 (AfrikTimes) – Google parent company Alphabet announced on Wednesday a leadership overhaul of its artificial intelligence division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company.
The shakeup comes during a pivotal period for Google DeepMind. The flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which hired prominent Google AI researchers this summer. Shares of Alphabet fell 4% after the news.
Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet’s chief scientist and transition from serving as Google DeepMind CEO to chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the growing proximity of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced stage of AI in which computers could match human-level intelligence, as the reason for the change.
“(Hassabis) and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate company-wide memo. “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.”
Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit’s chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le — some of Google’s most prominent AI and engineering leaders — left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on research in machine learning, science and engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation.
Alphabet did not provide details on what prompted the leadership changes or their timing.
According to a Reuters report published last year, some people who worked with Hassabis said he often prioritised scientific research over commercial objectives at Google. They said the London-born scientist viewed winning a Nobel Prize as one of DeepMind’s goals and had resisted some initiatives that could have generated new revenue for Alphabet or strengthened its competitive position in the AI race. Supporters within Google disputed that characterisation, saying he remained committed to both scientific progress and business goals.
Senior leaders in Google Cloud, the company’s primary AI revenue driver, welcomed Kavukcuoglu’s appointment on Wednesday as a positive step for accelerating commercialisation efforts, according to a source with direct knowledge.
Kavukcuoglu had already played a more direct role than Hassabis in collaborations between DeepMind and Google Cloud, and his appointment was expected to steer Gemini toward a more product-focused direction, the source said.
Hassabis will focus on research and strategy related to the societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, an Alphabet spokesperson told reporters.
In his company memo, Hassabis highlighted the “great progress” made on Google’s AI models, including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4.
He also said he would devote more time to Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind, which he founded and continues to lead as CEO.
“I’ve always believed the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health,” he said. “It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.”
Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
BRAIN DRAIN
Dean and Hassabis had long been regarded as Google’s two leading AI figures before artificial intelligence became the centre of the technology industry’s rapid expansion.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to lead the London-based lab after selling it to Google for about $650 million in 2014.
Dean co-founded Google Brain in 2011, a U.S.-based AI research unit that operated separately from DeepMind. He had already established himself as one of Google’s most respected engineers through his work with Ghemawat on infrastructure projects that continue to underpin the company’s operations.
In 2023, after OpenAI’s ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organisation called Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed CEO, while Dean became chief scientist.
Until recently, Dean, Vinyals and Noam Shazeer co-led development of Gemini. Under their leadership, Google released Gemini 3 last November, which was widely viewed as narrowing the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
However, continued advances by those rivals, along with the growing momentum of lower-cost Chinese open-source AI models, have placed Google under increasing competitive pressure. At Google’s annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other executives highlighted Gemini’s cost advantage rather than its cutting-edge capabilities.
Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than two years after Google paid billions to recruit him and his research team from the startup he had led. That same week, senior research scientist John Jumper, who shared a Nobel Prize with Hassabis in 2024, announced that he would join Anthropic.
Vinyals, Le and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever co-authored a landmark 2014 research paper that helped shape modern AI by demonstrating that scaling up data to pre-train AI systems could significantly improve their capabilities.
“Google has a deep bench of talent but losing these four individuals will leave a mark for some time. Getting innovation and execution back online is not going to be easy and losing key contributors won’t make it any better,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist for Zacks Investment Management.
Discovery Loop received investment from Google and also entered into a partnership with the company’s cloud division to provide computing capacity.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, at the company’s annual conference on Wednesday, showed some of what it has been working on.
Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco, additional reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Lisa Shumaker
