Google DeepMind shakeup: Hassabis becomes Chair, Jeff Dean exits

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced major leadership changes at Google DeepMind (GDM) to accelerate progress on the AI frontier and AGI. Demis Hassabis, co-founder and long-time CEO of DeepMind, will transition to Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. In his new role, Hassabis will focus on shaping the future of AGI and science, working closely with GDM's research and modeling teams. He described this as a pivotal moment, saying 'we are standing in the foothills of the singularity' and that AGI is 'close at hand.'

Koray Kavukcuoglu, GDM's CTO and Chief AI Architect, will step up as SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Meanwhile, after 27 years at Google, Jeff Dean—a key architect of early search infrastructure and neural networks—is departing with Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat to launch an independent public benefit corporation focused on accelerating discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. Google will remain a founding investor and Cloud partner. The changes come as GDM hits major milestones: the Gemini app has 950M+ monthly users, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M downloads.