Demis Hassabis gave up the CEO title on Wednesday to become chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, formalizing a shift away from day-to-day management and toward AGI strategy and scientific applications of AI. In a note to staff, Hassabis wrote: "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," adding that it is "critical that we collectively get the next steps right" and that he had decided to hand over his "day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture."
Taking over day-to-day operations is Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously CTO of DeepMind and Alphabet's chief AI architect, who will serve as senior vice president of Google DeepMind reporting directly to Sundar Pichai; his appointment is expected to align DeepMind more closely with Google Cloud and commercial product goals, including the training of the as-yet-unreleased Gemini 4. Kavukcuoglu joined DeepMind in its early days and has worked with Hassabis for more than 13 years; Pichai credited him with building DeepMind's deep learning team and helping drive breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN. The transition does not stand alone: 27-year Google veteran Jeff Dean and a group of key researchers are leaving the company to form a Google-backed startup named Discovery Loop. Joining Dean in that effort are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le.
Hassabis had spent less time on Gemini, Google's struggling frontier AI model, in recent months, according to two people with knowledge of his focus, and was spending more time on questions of safety and what the arrival of AGI would mean for society. His move away from fronting DeepMind follows weeks of upheaval at the unit, including the dissolution of DeepMind's AlphaFold team; in June, John Jumper, co-winner with Hassabis of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left Google for Anthropic, followed by two colleagues. The move comes alongside a broader restructuring of Google DeepMind, as Google attempts to catch up to industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic.
The announcement drew immediate skepticism from within the lab's own walls. Some safety teams that previously reported up through DeepMind's leadership may be moved to report to Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, though decisions have not been finalized; one DeepMind employee told Time they were worried that safety, responsibility, and ethics teams moved from DeepMind into Google "may lose their influence." Google's stock fell over 4 percent on the news. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai described Hassabis' move as the culmination of discussions about "a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," a framing that critics will note conveniently repackages an operational departure as a promotion.
Put plainly: the man who argued for years that AGI is the most important project in human history has now decided it is too important for him to also be managing quarterly product roadmaps.