Signal Demis Hassabis Steps Down as Google DeepMind CEO Amid Broader Leadership Reshuffle

Summary

Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day operational leadership of Google DeepMind to become Chair of DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead AI drug-discovery unit Isomorphic Labs. DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, who has worked with Hassabis for more than 13 years, becomes Senior Vice President overseeing daily operations, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai and managing Gemini model development and frontier AI research. Hassabis wrote to staff that he believes 'AGI is close at hand' and that getting the next steps right is critical for humanity. Simultaneously, 27-year Google veteran and DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean is departing, along with researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, to launch a public-benefit corporation called Discovery Loop, with Google as a founding investor and cloud partner. The reshuffle follows a string of other high-profile departures this year, including Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI in June, and researcher David Silver in February, as Google's AI organization navigates intensifying competition with OpenAI and Anthropic.