Hassabis hands over the reins: a new era for DeepMind
Google announced on Wednesday 5 August the biggest restructuring of its artificial intelligence division in years. Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, is leaving the day-to-day management of the laboratory to become president of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, a newly created role. At the same time, Jeff Dean, one of the company’s most veteran engineers, leaves Google after 27 years to found his own project. The news, communicated in letters to employees, made Alphabet’s share price fall 5%.
Hassabis hands over the leadership of DeepMind
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 and sold it to Google in 2014 for about 650 million dollars. Since then he led the laboratory that produced AlphaGo and AlphaFold, the protein prediction system that earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. In his new phase he will remain at the head of Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI drug division, and will focus on the global strategy of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and science.
“We have reached a crucial moment in the history of humanity,” Hassabis wrote to his team. “I have worked all my life towards AGI and now I feel it’s close. It’s essential that we take the next steps well.” For him, “the number one application of AI should be improving human health”, and he said it’s time to prove its value “by finally helping to cure diseases like cancer”.
His successor will be Koray Kavukcuoglu, until now DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect. He has spent 13 years at the laboratory and led advances such as WaveNet and DQN; he takes over as senior vice president and will report directly to Pichai, overseeing the development of Gemini, frontier research and the assistant’s applications.
Jeff Dean leaves Google and founds Discovery Loop
The other big move comes from the more veteran side. Jeff Dean, Google employee number 30 and chief scientist for almost three decades, leaves the company alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, senior fellow, to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that wants to “automate machine learning, science and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress”. Alphabet will be a founding investor and cloud computing partner, and according to Fortune the former Googlers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are also joining.
“After an incredible 27-year career, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re delighted to support him,” Pichai said. “Jeff and Sanjay helped drive the most important technological transitions, from the initial search infrastructure to the neural networks that created the modern era of AI.”
The pressure over Gemini 4 and the fear of falling behind
The restructuring doesn’t come at just any moment: Google’s flagship, the next generation of Gemini, still hasn’t been released despite the launch scheduled for June, feeding concern over the advantage of rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. Both have signed Google stars this summer: Noam Shazeer, co-leader of Gemini, moved to OpenAI, and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic.
Hassabis, nevertheless, argues that “the Gemini models are in good hands” and boasts of “great progress”, naming the not-yet-released Gemini 4. Pichai insists that Google has “amazing talent, first-class compute and products that bring AI to more people than any other company”, recalling the 950 million monthly users of the Gemini app and the 900 million downloads of Gemma.
Brain drain or planned reshuffle?
The news admits two readings. For sceptics, it confirms a brain drain: two of the most influential figures in Google’s AI leave their posts, and Dean’s departure adds to those of Shazeer and Jumper. The fall of the stock, of around 4-5%, reflects that nervousness.
For Google, on the other hand, it’s a natural evolution: Hassabis isn’t leaving the company, he moves up to a strategic vision role, and Kavukcuoglu guarantees the continuity of Gemini. The numbers back it up: Google Cloud grew 82% year-on-year in the last quarter and the capital investment planned for 2026 reaches 195,000-205,000 million dollars.
A change of era at the summit of AI
Dean’s departure and Hassabis’s succession symbolically close the first generation of Google’s AI leaders. Pichai described him as someone “on the foothills of the singularity”; now it will be he who, from the presidency and the science, sets the pace towards that summit, while Kavukcuoglu turns Gemini into the product that proves Google is still at the forefront. The outcome will be decided when the long-awaited Gemini 4 reaches the market.
