Alphabet Reshuffles AI Leadership as Four Veterans Exit
Demis Hassabis moves to a strategy and research role as Koray Kavukcuoglu takes charge of Google DeepMind and four longtime executives launch Discovery Loop.
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Alphabet has reorganized the leadership of its artificial intelligence business, moving Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis away from day-to-day management as four senior AI and engineering executives leave to start a new company.
Hassabis will become Alphabet’s chief scientist and chairman of Google DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Alphabet’s chief AI architect, will assume operational control of the unit as a senior vice president reporting to Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai.
Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini application and developer teams, giving him responsibility for both the underlying technology and its rollout across Google’s products.
Pichai said the new structure would allow Hassabis to focus on “actively shaping the future of AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, while remaining an adviser to DeepMind’s research and model teams.
Hassabis said he wanted more time to examine the development and wider effects of increasingly capable AI systems. He will also devote greater attention to Isomorphic Labs, which applies AI to drug discovery.
The reshuffle comes as Google faces pressure to accelerate its AI releases. A flagship Gemini model planned for June has yet to be launched, Reuters reported. Hassabis said the company was making “great progress” on an unreleased model called Gemini 4.
Alphabet shares fell 4% on Wednesday, August 5, following the announcements.
The leadership change coincided with the departure of Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, who have founded Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation seeking to automate research in machine learning, science and engineering.
Dean, who spent almost 27 years at Google, co-founded Google Brain and served as chief scientist of Google Research and Google DeepMind. Ghemawat worked with Dean on computing systems that became central to Google’s search and cloud infrastructure.
Vinyals was a DeepMind research vice president and technical leader for Gemini, while Le was a founding member of Google Brain and worked on machine-learning systems that could design other AI models.
Discovery Loop plans to build systems that can propose experiments, conduct them, assess the results and use those findings to determine the next round of research. Its initial work will focus on improving machine-learning methods before expanding into areas such as biology, drug discovery, materials and chip design.
The departures are not a complete break with Alphabet. Google has invested in Discovery Loop and will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner. The companies also plan to collaborate on research into machine-learning systems and computing infrastructure.
Alphabet did not give a detailed explanation for the four departures or their timing. Discovery Loop’s founders told Wired that they wanted the freedom to build a different kind of research organization outside a large company.
The changes follow the June exits of Gemini co-leader Noam Shazeer, who joined OpenAI, and Nobel laureate John Jumper, who moved to Anthropic. Dean, Vinyals and Shazeer had until recently shared responsibility for Gemini’s technical development, according to Reuters.
The new structure separates Alphabet’s longer-term work on AGI and science from the operational management of DeepMind’s models and products.
Kavukcuoglu now carries the immediate task of speeding up Gemini development and turning Google’s large AI investments into widely used products, while Hassabis concentrates on research strategy and the longer-term direction of the technology.
