Hassabis Steps Aside as DeepMind CEO in a Google Reshuffle

Google reshaped the leadership of its artificial intelligence work on 5 August, and the changes are hard to overstate. Demis Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and shared a Nobel Prize in 2024 for predicting protein structures, is stepping down as chief executive of the lab. He moves into the role of chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, staying in London and turning his attention to what he called the big picture, according to reporting from Fortune and Axios.

Day-to-day command of DeepMind passes to Koray Kavukcuoglu, the lab's former chief technology officer and Alphabet's chief AI architect. He takes the title of senior vice president and will report directly to Sundar Pichai. Hassabis said he has total confidence in Kavukcuoglu and the team around him, and he plans to spend more time on Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet drug-discovery company he also leads.

A second departure lands at the same time

The bigger surprise sits one seat over. Jeff Dean, who joined Google 27 years ago and helped build much of its early infrastructure, is leaving to co-found a startup called Discovery Loop. The new venture is a public benefit corporation aimed at automating machine learning and scientific research, and it arrives with backing from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital, and Alphabet itself, as The Decoder reported.

Dean is not going alone. His co-founders include Oriol Vinyals, who led the AlphaStar project and a good deal of Gemini's development, along with Google Brain pioneer Quoc Le and senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat. Losing that much institutional memory in a single week would strain any research organisation, and DeepMind is the group that has carried Google's answer to OpenAI.

Why the timing matters

The reshuffle comes as Google's next flagship, Gemini 3.5 Pro, has slipped well past its original June target, and after the company lost Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic. Read one way, this is a founder handing off operations to focus on the science he cares about most. Read another, it is a lab absorbing a wave of senior exits while the competition ships. Both readings can be true at once.

For now the research keeps moving. DeepMind pushed out Gemini Robotics 2 only days ago, a sign that the pipeline does not depend on any single name at the top. The open question is whether a lab defined for fifteen years by Hassabis and Dean holds its edge once both step back from the daily work.