Google AI shakeup: Hassabis steps back, Jeff Dean exits to launch Discovery Loop

Leadership overhaul

Google announced a reorganization of its artificial intelligence leadership on Wednesday. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning co-founder of DeepMind, is stepping down as CEO to become chair of the lab and chief scientist of parent company Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's longtime technology chief, takes over as senior vice president, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai and overseeing development of the Gemini models. At the same time, Jeff Dean, Alphabet's chief scientist and one of Google's most influential engineers, is leaving the company after 27 years to launch a startup with three other senior researchers.

He and I have been talking for a long time about finding a way for him to devote his full attention to shaping the future of general AI. That is a vitally important job for Alphabet and for humanity, and I can think of no one better than Demis to carry it out.

Discovery Loop: automating science

Dean's new venture, Discovery Loop, is a public benefit corporation that aims to use AI to accelerate scientific research by automating experimental loops. Co-founders include Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow at Google, Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, a Gemini co-lead. The startup's website went live the same day, though Google's initial announcement mentioned only Dean and Ghemawat. Discovery Loop has raised an initial funding round co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet itself is also an investor and will serve as the startup's cloud provider.

While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck. Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops.

Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as employee number 30, said in an interview that the company sees an opportunity "to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop." The idea came together only weeks ago, and the startup has no office yet. On July 25, Dean gave a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School on building in AI; eleven days later, he announced his own company.

Hassabis steps back but stays

Hassabis, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using AI to predict protein structures, will remain at Alphabet in a newly created role. He will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the pharmaceutical spinoff applying AI to drug discovery, and will move into DeepMind's new Platform 37 offices in London. In a memo to staff, he said the change would let him "focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come."

I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand.

Kavukcuoglu, who has spent 13 years at DeepMind and started its deep learning team, is not an outsider. He led work on WaveNet and DQN and now inherits responsibility for Gemini 4, the next-generation model.

Pressure on Gemini

The shakeup unfolds as Google races to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic. The company was caught off guard by ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 and has since reorganized around AI, but its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model, expected in June, was delayed. In July, Google released several smaller models, including one focused on cybersecurity, which performed well on benchmarks but did not outpace competitors. The company also recently disbanded the AlphaFold team, reassigning some employees and losing others.

Market reaction

Alphabet shares fell about 4% in Wall Street trading after the announcements. The departures of Dean and the Gemini co-leads, combined with the leadership transition at DeepMind, raised questions about Google's confidence in its AI trajectory.