Google Overhauls DeepMind Leadership as Senior AI Researchers Leave

Google parent Alphabet has reorganized its artificial-intelligence leadership as several influential researchers leave to create a new startup. Demis Hassabis will move from Google DeepMind chief executive to the newly created position of Alphabet chief scientist. He will also become chairman of DeepMind and focus more heavily on artificial general intelligence, scientific research and the societal implications of advanced AI. Google DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu will assume responsibility for day-to-day operations. The changes coincide with the departure of veteran engineers Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. They plan to establish Discovery Loop, a public-benefit company focused on machine-learning, scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Google will invest in the new company and provide computing capacity through Google Cloud. The departures matter because those researchers helped create technologies and infrastructure that shaped modern artificial intelligence. The restructuring arrives while Google faces pressure to release its next major Gemini model and compete with Anthropic, OpenAI and increasingly capable open-source systems. Alphabet remains one of the world’s best-funded AI organizations, with its own models, custom processors, cloud infrastructure and consumer distribution. The leadership overhaul will test whether those advantages can offset the departure of several researchers closely associated with its most important AI breakthroughs.