Demis Hassabis is stepping down from his position as CEO of Google DeepMind, an AI research lab in London that Google acquired a dozen years ago.
The Nobel laureate is becoming chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, Google’s parent.
“This will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease,” he wrote in a post on X. Hassabis is also the founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs, which aims to innovate drug discovery with AI.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Hassabis will be able to focus on helping shape the future of AGI as well as drive breakthroughs in science. “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it,” he wrote in a post on X.
The move comes amid several key departures at Google, including Hassabis’ co-winner of the Nobel Prize, John Jumper, who went to Anthropic. Noam Shazeer, Google’s Gemini co-lead, left for OpenAI. Gemini researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel also left DeepMind for Anthropic.
Pichai said Koray Kavukcuoglu will become senior vice president at DeepMind, responsible for model development, research and Gemini’s app and developer teams.
Pichai also announced that Jeff Dean, co-founder of Google Brain who helped build much of the infrastructure behind Google Search, is also leaving. He and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting a public benefit corporation to discover innovations in engineering and science. Alphabet will be a founding investor in their company.
“Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era,” Pichai wrote in a blog post. “I wish them all the best!”