Friday, August 7, 2026

Google DeepMind reshuffles leadership as Hassabis steps back

Google DeepMind

Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO of Google DeepMind on August 5, moving to Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet to focus on long-term AGI research and Isomorphic Labs. The same day, longtime Google chief scientist Jeff Dean announced he is leaving after 27 years to co-found an AI-for-science startup, Discovery Loop, alongside fellow departing Googlers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le; Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of Google DeepMind, taking over day-to-day operations and the Gemini roadmap while reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, and Alphabet shares fell about 4% on the news.