Demis Hassabis steps down as chief executive of Google DeepMind, though he isn’t leaving the company. He is moving into a newly created chairman role and adding the title of chief scientist at parent company Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug-discovery venture he also heads.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s current chief technology officer, takes over day-to-day operations as senior vice president. He will report directly to Alphabet and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai. The reshuffle arrives as DeepMind faces mounting pressure to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build more capable AI models.
Why Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO
The chief scientist title opens up because Jeff Dean, who currently holds the position, is leaving Google to start a company called Discovery Loop. Dean is bringing several colleagues with him. Google is investing an unspecified amount in the new venture and will serve as its cloud provider.
Discovery Loop plans to build AI models that improve themselves with little or no human input. “We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dean told The New York Times.
A broader shake-up inside Google’s AI division
The leadership changes follow other recent moves inside DeepMind. Google disbanded the team behind AlphaFold, the AI system Hassabis helped build that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Google reassigned some staff to other teams; others left the company on their own.
AlphaFold cut a process that once took years down to minutes, and the technology now supports research into treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The work won Hassabis and two colleagues the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024.
Google has also expanded its financial ties to a chief AI rival. The company plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, after already putting in $10 billion back in April. The remaining $30 billion depends on Anthropic meeting specific performance milestones set by Google.
What changes for DeepMind’s structure
DeepMind has not previously operated with a chairman role separate from its executive leadership, so Hassabis’s new title is a structural change as much as a personal one. He keeps a hand in both DeepMind’s direction and Alphabet’s broader AI strategy, while Kavukcuoglu now owns the operational side of the lab behind AlphaGo, Gemini, and AlphaFold.
The changes land at a moment when Google is spending heavily to defend its position against rivals it also funds. Hassabis will not disappear from DeepMind’s org chart, but the executive who ran it day to day for sixteen years now answers to someone else.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, before Google acquired the lab in 2014. Under his leadership, DeepMind built AlphaGo, the program that beat world champion Lee Sedol at the board game Go in 2016. It later folded its research into Google’s Gemini model family after merging with Google Brain in 2023. Google has not said whether further leadership changes are planned across its AI division, and it has given no timeline for when Kavukcuoglu formally assumes his new operational duties.