Nobel Prize Winner Demis Hassabis Appointed Chief Scientist at Alphabet

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.