San Francisco (United States) (AFP) – Google’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet’s chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer’s departure. Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. The change “will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease,” Hassabis wrote in a social media post. Isomorphic Labs is an AI-powered drug discovery lab that spun out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
As part of the shake-up, DeepMind’s chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division’s senior vice president and oversee its operations including the development of Google’s flagship frontier models and products which are known as Gemini. Longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean is also leaving the company after nearly three decades to “try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post announcing the news. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for $650 million, according to reports at the time. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently the chief of Microsoft’s AI segment.
Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China. The industry is also chasing a theoretical milestone known as advanced general intelligence (AGI), which is a point when AI software matches the capabilities of human thinking. “I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote in Wednesday’s blog post. “With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at (Google DeepMind), so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come,” Hassabis continued.
Observers have been waiting for Google to announce a more powerful version of its AI model, called Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears to be delayed. Its shares closed 4 percent down Wednesday afternoon. The leadership changes come amid a wider brain drain at Google. In June, a top AI and engineering executive, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI, while senior researcher John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumped to Anthropic.
© 2024 AFP
