Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces major Google DeepMind leadership changes as Demis Hassabis becomes Chair and Alphabet Chief Scientist, Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as SVP, and Jeff Dean exits after 27 years to launch a new AI venture.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has announced a major leadership reshuffle at Google DeepMind, with Demis Hassabis moving into a new Alphabet-wide role, Jeff Dean departing after 27 years at the company, and Koray Kavukcuoglu stepping up to lead the AI unit's day-to-day operations. The changes were detailed in an internal email to employees, later published on Google's official blog.

Demis Hassabis takes on Alphabet-wide role

Hassabis, who co-founded Google DeepMind, will become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company he has run alongside DeepMind since 2021. Pichai wrote that Google has made extraordinary progress delivering on its full AI stack, with amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company. Explaining the rationale behind Hassabis's new role, Pichai said Demis had described the company as standing in the foothills of the singularity and had been spending a lot of his time engaging externally, adding that the two of them had long been discussing a role that would allow Hassabis to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI. Pichai called it work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, saying he could not imagine a better person than Demis to do it. Hassabis will remain closely connected to Kavukcuoglu and the Google DeepMind teams, advising across models and research.

Koray Kavukcuoglu to lead Google DeepMind as SVP