Alphabet reshapes AI leadership at DeepMind

Alphabet (GOOG) has announced a broad reshuffle of its artificial intelligence leadership focused on Google DeepMind. The move changes the roles of some of the company’s most prominent AI figures while coinciding with the departure of several long-serving researchers to a new startup.

Demis Hassabis, a co-founder and long-time leader of DeepMind, will step back from day-to-day operational leadership of Google DeepMind. He will become Chair of Google DeepMind and take on the newly defined position of Chief Scientist of Alphabet, a group-level role overseeing scientific direction.

Hassabis will retain responsibilities beyond DeepMind as well. He will continue to spend time leading Isomorphic Labs, maintaining a presence across multiple Alphabet-affiliated scientific efforts while no longer managing DeepMind’s daily operations.

Operational control of Google DeepMind will pass to Koray Kavukcuoglu. He will serve as Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, taking over day-to-day management of the division and reporting directly to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Kavukcuoglu’s remit includes overseeing development of future Gemini models, frontier AI research, and key product and developer teams within Google DeepMind. The changes place him at the center of the unit’s execution on advanced AI systems and their integration into products.

The reshuffle effectively separates high-level scientific and strategic responsibilities, now concentrated with Hassabis at the Alphabet level, from daily operational and product-focused leadership, now under Kavukcuoglu within Google DeepMind.

Alongside the leadership changes at Google DeepMind, Alphabet is seeing the departure of some of its most influential AI engineers. Jeff Dean, who spent 27 years at Google and played a central role in its core AI and infrastructure work, is leaving the company.

Dean is co-founding a new startup called Discovery Loop. He will not be alone in the venture: senior Google researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are also part of the Discovery Loop launch, marking a significant outflow of experience from Alphabet’s AI ranks.

Despite these departures, Alphabet will retain a formal relationship with the new company. It will act as a financial backer and cloud partner to Discovery Loop, described as a founding investor and Cloud partner for the venture.

The announcements around the AI leadership reshuffle and the creation of Discovery Loop were followed by a negative market response. Major outlets reported that Alphabet’s shares fell on the day the changes became public.

The combination of reassigning DeepMind’s top leadership, moving Hassabis into a broader scientific role, and losing Jeff Dean and other senior researchers highlighted a period of transition for Alphabet’s AI efforts. At the same time, Alphabet’s backing of Discovery Loop indicates an effort to keep close ties with some of its departing talent through investment and cloud partnerships.