Demis Hassabis Steps Aside as Google DeepMind CEO to Become Chairman

Google announced a leadership reorganization at Google DeepMind on Wednesday. Demis Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and led it through its acquisition by Google and its later merger with the company's research teams, is giving up the chief executive title. He becomes chairman of Google DeepMind and takes on the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, while continuing to run Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug-discovery spinoff. Day-to-day operations pass to Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind's chief technology officer and Alphabet's chief AI architect. According to internal memos reported by the press, Kavukcuoglu will hold a senior vice president position rather than a standalone CEO role, and will report directly to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai. The reporting change places the AI lab closer to the top of the company's hierarchy. In memos from Hassabis and Pichai, the shift was framed as allowing the co-founder to concentrate on longer-term questions: strategy around artificial general intelligence and the scientific applications of AI, rather than the daily management of product teams and the Gemini model line. Asked about model safety, a Google spokesperson said frontier model safety has been embedded within the Gemini team from the start under Kavukcuoglu's leadership, and that his teams' collaboration with safety and policy groups across Google and Google DeepMind would continue. The reshuffle comes amid significant churn inside Alphabet's AI organization, including several high-profile researcher departures, and against a backdrop of intense competition among frontier model labs.