Google said Wednesday that Demis Hassabis, the DeepMind co-founder who has led Alphabet's artificial-intelligence lab since Google acquired it, is handing daily control of the unit to Koray Kavukcuoglu and becoming chair of DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet.
The shuffle, disclosed by Chief Executive Sundar Pichai in a staff memo, arrives with the departure of two of Google's most senior technologists — Jeff Dean, the company's 30th employee, and Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat — who are leaving to found an AI startup called Discovery Loop. Google will be a "founding investor" in the new firm, Pichai said.
The reshuffle
Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's chief technology officer, takes the title of senior vice president of Google DeepMind and continues as the company's chief AI architect, reporting directly to Pichai. Hassabis will remain in charge of Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, which uses AI to develop drugs. In his memo to staff, Hassabis said he had "been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand." He added that he would "continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters."
The exits
Dean is leaving alongside Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation whose stated aim is to build "AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering." Steven Levy of Wired reported that Pichai held "multiple meetings" with the group in an effort to keep them at Google before the four decided to leave. Dean, employee number 30, helped build the search infrastructure that made Google a global information index and, with Vinyals, played a central role in designing the Gemini models.
The exits follow an earlier run of high-profile losses. Noam Shazeer, the lead author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which described the transformer architecture behind modern generative AI, left Google for OpenAI. John Jumper, the DeepMind vice president whose AlphaFold protein-folding system won broad scientific acclaim, decamped for Anthropic, later joined by senior DeepMind researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel.
Pichai's line
"We've got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company," Pichai said in his announcement. Google told developers at its I/O conference this spring that it would ship its next frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, in June. It has so far released only lower-power Flash versions of the model, while OpenAI and Anthropic have shipped new frontier systems.
The absent view
Alphabet had not released additional public comment beyond Pichai's memo and Hassabis's staff note, and today's reporting did not include an independent AI-safety voice weighing the implications of Google's most public artificial-general-intelligence evangelist stepping back from day-to-day research oversight. Whether the shift accelerates or slows Google's Gemini roadmap will turn on Kavukcuoglu, who has run DeepMind's engineering agenda for years but has spoken publicly far less than Hassabis.
Google's next scheduled update on the Gemini roadmap comes with Alphabet's third-quarter earnings, when Pichai will face Wall Street questions about whether the reshuffle can put Gemini 3.5 Pro back on track.