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DeepMind reshuffle
Google parent Alphabet announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division in which Demis Hassabis left his main managerial role at Google DeepMind and became Alphabet’s chief scientist and chairman of the lab, while Koray Kavukcuoglu took on day-to-day responsibilities as senior vice president.
“Shares of Alphabet fell 4% after the news.”
The shakeup came as the flagship version of Google’s latest Gemini model remained unreleased despite a planned June launch, and the news contributed to shares of Alphabet falling 4% after the announcement.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a company-wide memo that “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity,” as Hassabis cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as the impetus for his role change.
Hassabis also said in a memo to staff that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery company spun out of DeepMind that he founded and remains CEO, adding “I’ve always believed the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health.”
The changes also included departures of Gemini leaders, with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le leaving to launch a startup called Discovery Loop as a public benefit corporation.
Dean’s exit and Discovery Loop
Jeff Dean announced his resignation after 27 years with Google, saying in a farewell message shared with colleagues and posted on X that “Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years,” as he prepared to launch Discovery Loop.
NDTV described Dean joining forces with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to found Discovery Loop as a public benefit corporation focused on using artificial intelligence to automate experimental workflows in science and engineering.
WIRED reported that at Y Combinator’s Startup School at San Francisco’s Chase Center on July 25, Dean described an automated scientific method: “You propose an experiment, you implement what you need to run the experiment, you evaluate the experiment, and then you get results from that,”.
WIRED also said Discovery Loop’s autonomous experiment loops would be directed toward improving advanced machine learning algorithms, and that the improved software would become the core of an AI system to tackle problems in subsequent domains.
In a post on X, Dean said the four founders were “founding Discovery Loop a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering,” while Google would invest and provide cloud computing services.
Competition, stakes, and next moves
The leadership churn unfolded as Google faced investor and industry concerns that it was falling behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, with the Indian Express noting that each “scooped up a star Google AI staffer this summer” and that the Gemini flagship remained unreleased despite a planned June launch.
““We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier,””
Business Insider said the change to Hassabis’s role was the biggest part of the shakeup, quoting Pichai: “We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier,” while also stressing “there’s never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science.”
The Indian Express reported that Koray Kavukcuoglu would steer Gemini toward a more product-oriented direction, and that he would hold the title of senior vice president rather than CEO of the business unit.
WIRED framed the departures as a blow to Google’s attempt to keep pace in the AI model competition, while noting that Discovery Loop was structured as a public benefit corporation and that Google would take a stake.
In parallel, the Indian Express said Hassabis would explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI with few direct reports, and that he touted “great progress” on Google’s AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4.
