Demis Hassabis steps back from DeepMind CEO role in Alphabet AI overhaul
DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis will become chair of the AI lab and Alphabet’s chief scientist, while technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over day-to-day leadership.
In short
- DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis will become chair of the AI lab and Alphabet’s chief scientist, while technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over day-to-day leadership.
Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind as part of a wider reshuffle at Alphabet’s artificial intelligence division.
Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, will become the laboratory’s chair and take on a new role as chief scientist at Alphabet, Google’s parent company. DeepMind chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu will lead the organisation under the title of senior vice-president.
Announcing the change on Wednesday, August 5, Hassabis said he wanted more time to focus on the broader scientific and social questions surrounding artificial general intelligence, a still-theoretical form of AI capable of matching human performance across cognitive tasks.
Hassabis will remain chief executive of Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery company spun out of DeepMind. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work connected to AlphaFold, DeepMind’s system for predicting protein structures.
The leadership changes extend beyond Hassabis. Veteran Google engineers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are also leaving to establish Discovery Loop, a startup focused on machine learning, science and engineering research.
The departures come amid intense competition among Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic to develop more capable AI systems, including software agents that can perform complex coding tasks. Alphabet shares closed 4 percent lower on Wednesday, although the source report did not attribute the movement solely to the leadership changes.
DeepMind was founded in London and acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million. Hassabis has recently advocated international oversight of the most powerful AI models, arguing that safety arrangements must develop alongside technical capability.
