Google announced on Wednesday, August 5th, a series of changes affecting the leaders of DeepMind, the company's artificial intelligence unit. Demis Hassabis, who held the position of division CEO, will step down, and Chief Scientist Jeff Dean will also leave the company.
These changes occur at a time when Google discontinued the AlphaFold project, which earned Hassabis a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and when several DeepMind researchers left the laboratory to join competing companies.
Demis Hassabis, one of the co-founders of DeepMind and former CEO, will retain his roles as chairman of the unit's board and chief scientist of Alphabet, the holding company that owns Google and other corporations. Furthermore, he will remain in charge of Isomorphic Labs, the group's company dedicated to pharmaceutical research using AI.
Hassabis has been with Google since 2014, the year the company acquired DeepMind, and is recognized as one of the main drivers of AI progress in recent years. In a communication to employees, Hassabis explained his decision: 'I decided that now is the time to pass my operational responsibilities at Google DeepMind to someone else, so that I have time and space to see things more broadly and influence them in the best way possible, according to my skills.'
To take over these responsibilities, Google will appoint Koray Kavukcuoglu, who is currently the head of technology at Google DeepMind. Kavukcuoglu will become the senior vice president of the unit and will continue to serve as Google's chief AI architect. He will assume leadership of the division, a role previously held by Hassabis, and will report directly to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google.
Another change concerns Jeff Dean, who was the chief scientist at DeepMind. He will leave Google to establish his own startup, named Discovery Loop. This new company will be non-profit, focusing on advancing AI for science and engineering fields, and will receive financial contributions from Google.
Dean remained at Google for 27 years, being the 30th employee hired by the organization. In 2011, he founded Google Brain, a lab dedicated to AI. Google Brain and DeepMind were merged in 2023 with the goal of accelerating the development of a rival to ChatGPT. In an interview with The New York Times, Dean mentioned that the move would give him greater freedom to focus on scientific discoveries related to AI.
In recent weeks, reports emerged that Google dismantled the group responsible for AlphaFold, a scientific project focused on predicting protein structures with the aid of AI. With this decision, several researchers began working on the development of Gemini, but about 25% of the original article authors left the company. The departure of prominent professionals to competitors caused internal surprise.
Additionally, some observers point out that the launch of Gemini 3.5 Pro is delayed. While the most sophisticated model remains in version 3.1, the Flash and Thinking modalities have already reached generation 3.5 and are currently at 3.6. According to the portal Axios, there is a correlation between these two facts: the delay of the most advanced model may be motivated by low employee morale given the company's outlook. In his new position, Kavukcuoglu will be responsible for guiding the development of Gemini 4.
As observed by Reuters, Hassabis and Dean were seen as the central figures of Google in the AI domain. The changes, as expected, caused instability in the financial market, leading Google's shares to drop 4% immediately after the news was released. The information was provided by CNBC and Business Insider.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, has announced significant changes in the leadership of its artificial intelligence division. Demis Hassabis has stepped down from his primary executive role, and several leaders of the Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, have left the company to found a new AI startup.
These personnel shifts occur at a critical juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of the latest Gemini model has yet to be released despite a planned June launch. This has raised concerns among investors and the industry that Google is falling behind competitors Anthropic and OpenAI, who recruited star Google AI employees this summer.
Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, will take on the new role of Chief Scientist at Alphabet, transitioning from CEO of Google DeepMind to Chairman of the Board. He explained this change in role by noting the approaching state of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—an advanced state of AI where computers essentially become as intelligent as humans.
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's CEO, stated in a separate company-wide memo that he had long discussed a role that would allow Hassabis to focus entirely on shaping the future of AGI. He emphasized that this work is vital for Alphabet and humanity, and he could not imagine a better person for the task.
Koray Kavukçuoğlu, the division's CTO, will assume operational duties within the division. He will hold the position of Senior Vice President, rather than CEO, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet's Chief AI Architect.
Some of Google's most renowned and highly regarded leaders in AI and engineering, such as Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, have left the company to create a startup called Discovery Loop. This startup will specialize in research breakthroughs in machine learning, science, and engineering, structured as a public benefit corporation.
Alphabet has not provided detailed information regarding the reasons for these moves or any timing overlap. A Google representative told Reuters that Hassabis, who has long prioritized research over profit, will focus on strategy and research related to the social impact of AGI and will have few direct reports.
In an internal memo, Hassabis noted 'great progress' in Google's AI models, including an unreleased update named Gemini 4. He also mentioned that he will dedicate more time to Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company spun out of DeepMind, where he is a founder and CEO.
He stated that he has always believed that the best application of AI should be improving human health, and the time has come for AI to prove its undeniable value to the world, such as by assisting in treating diseases like cancer.
Dean and Hassabis were long considered two leading figures in AI at Google before the field became a hub of technological innovation. Hassabis founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to lead the London lab after its sale to Google for approximately $650 million in 2014. Dean founded Google Brain in 2011, a US-based division that researched AI separately from Hassabis's team.
By that time, Dean was already a respected figure within Google due to his collaboration with Ghemawat on implementing many landmark infrastructure projects that still run the company. In 2023, after OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organization—Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed its CEO, and Dean was named Chief Scientist.
Until recently, Dean, Vinyals, and Noam Shazeer jointly led the development of Gemini. Under their leadership, Google released Gemini 3 last November, which the industry widely viewed as narrowing the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI. However, subsequent advances by competitors, along with the rise of popular, cheaper open-source Chinese models, placed Google on the defensive.
At Google's annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other Google executives emphasized Gemini's cost advantage rather than its cutting-edge capabilities. Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than two years after Google spent billions attracting him and his research team from the startup he led. The same week, senior researcher John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize with Hassabis in 2024, announced his move to Anthropic. Vinyals, Le, and former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever co-authored the 2014 research that became foundational to modern AI research, establishing the concept that scaling data for AI system 'pre-training' would elevate them to new heights. Discovery Loop received investment from Google and also partnered with Google Cloud to provide computing power.
Google is dismantling the team responsible for AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence system dedicated to predicting protein structures, and reallocating researchers to other initiatives, including advancing Gemini. It is estimated that approximately a quarter of the authors of the initial scientific papers on AlphaFold have left Google DeepMind.
Google DeepMind confirmed that some collaborators were internally reassigned to projects focused on the large language model Gemini, as well as areas such as genomics, nuclear fusion, and enzyme design. Other professionals were transferred to Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet company focused on drug discovery. Alphabet acts as the controller of Google and several other science and technology entities.
According to the Financial Times, these movements reflect a change in DeepMind's scientific priorities. Pushmeet Kohli, Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind, informed the FT that the lab's strategy has changed. He mentioned that for the last nine years, the focus was on major challenges with specific goals, but now the lab encompasses Gemini-based systems to assist scientists, in addition to developing AI agents to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI.
John Jumper, one of the 2024 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, was assigned to the team working on developing Gemini's code generation capabilities. Recently, Jumper left Google and joined Anthropic. His colleagues in three-dimensional protein structure, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, followed the same path. An anonymous Google DeepMind employee told the FT that these departures caused internal surprise, given that the three were considered crucial members of the lab.
AlphaFold is software designed to predict and generate three-dimensional protein models using diffusion models, the same AI technology used in image generators. Thanks to this tool, researchers have been able to anticipate the structures of almost all 200 million proteins cataloged to date, offering a faster and more economical method than previous approaches, which could accelerate the development of protein drugs.
The project began in 2018, when DeepMind still operated as an Alphabet subsidiary. Another important milestone for the lab was AlphaGo, an AI software capable of defeating the world champion of Go. In 2023, due to the success of ChatGPT and OpenAI, DeepMind was integrated into Google to contribute to the development of AI applications in products. Previously, the relationship between the companies was marked by tensions, as the lab maintained an academic and scientific focus that incurred losses while seeking greater autonomy, something Google, responsible for the costs, had denied by refusing to transform DeepMind into a non-profit institution.
