Google DeepMind announces major leadership changes; Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO; All details

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced major leadership changes across Google DeepMind teams, with several key executives set to leave the company as part of the reshuffle. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down from the role, but will remain in the company as Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and he will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Alphabet’s chief AI architect, will now be taking over the role of senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.

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The reshuffle also joins with the departure of Jeff Dean, one of Google's most influential engineers and its Chief Scientist for over 27 years. He’s leaving the company to co-found a new startup called Discovery Loop. The startup's mission is to use AI to automate machine learning, scientific research, and engineering, helping researchers accelerate discoveries.

Jeff Dean will be joined by three other former Google executives and AI researchers, including Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Pichai in the blog post said, “We’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.”

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The reshuffle comes at a very crucial time for Google, as it is currently navigating the AI race amid growing competition. It is facing setbacks in its AI efforts, as its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model release has been delayed by several months. It was originally expected to launch in June.

Google is also losing key AI talent across the Gemini team. Noam Shazeer, who co-led the Gemini project, has reportedly moved to OpenAI. John Jumper, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist known for his work on AlphaFold, has reportedly joined Anthropic.