Google is restructuring the leadership of Google DeepMind as the company seeks to accelerate development of its Gemini models, frontier artificial intelligence research and work toward artificial general intelligence.
Demis Hassabis will transition from his day-to-day operational responsibilities to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. In the newly created strategic role, Hassabis will focus more closely on the long-term development of AGI, scientific research and the broader implications of increasingly capable AI systems.
Hassabis will remain involved with Google DeepMind by advising its model development and research teams. He will also continue working closely with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on global and strategic matters related to AGI.
As part of the transition, Hassabis will devote additional attention to Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed AI drug discovery company that he continues to lead. Isomorphic Labs is applying AI to pharmaceutical research with the goal of improving the discovery and development of medicines.
Hassabis said AI’s most important application should be improving human health, and he plans to accelerate Isomorphic Labs’ work toward using the technology to address diseases such as cancer.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently Google DeepMind’s Chief Technology Officer and Google’s Chief AI Architect, will become Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind and report directly to Pichai.
Kavukcuoglu will assume operational oversight of Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini application and Google’s AI developer teams. He will retain his responsibilities as Google’s Chief AI Architect.
Kavukcuoglu has worked at DeepMind for more than 13 years and joined during the organization’s early stages. He established its deep learning team and contributed to major research developments, including WaveNet and Deep Q-Networks.
Hassabis said Kavukcuoglu has already been closely involved in overseeing the Gemini models and expressed confidence in his ability to lead Google DeepMind’s next stage of development.
The leadership changes come as Google reports growing adoption across its AI products and research platforms. The Gemini application has surpassed 950 million monthly users, while Google’s Gemma family of open models has exceeded 900 million downloads.
Google also highlighted demand for its Gemini Flash models, the launch of its cybersecurity-focused AI model and recent advances in Gemini Robotics. The company is preparing additional model releases, including Gemini 4, although it did not provide a specific launch timeline.
Pichai said Google’s broader AI strategy benefits from the company’s ability to operate across the full technology stack, including infrastructure, computing resources, cloud services, frontier models and consumer applications.
Google has increasingly integrated Gemini into its largest products, including Search, AI Mode, AI Overviews and the Gemini app. The company is also expanding the availability of its models to developers and businesses through Google Cloud and its developer platforms.
The restructuring is designed to separate Google DeepMind’s immediate product and model-development priorities from the longer-term strategic questions surrounding AGI and scientific discovery.
Kavukcuoglu will focus on operating Google DeepMind and advancing Gemini, while Hassabis concentrates on the scientific, societal and strategic implications of more advanced AI systems.
The company also announced that longtime Google executives Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving their current roles to establish an independent public benefit corporation focused on accelerating discoveries in machine learning, science and engineering.
Dean spent 27 years at Google and played a central role in the development of the company’s early search infrastructure, distributed computing systems and neural network research. Ghemawat, a Google Senior Fellow, collaborated with Dean on several of the infrastructure technologies that helped Google scale its search and computing operations.
Google will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner for the new organization. The companies also plan to collaborate on a research framework focused on machine learning systems and related infrastructure developments.
The departures represent another significant change within Google’s AI and engineering leadership. However, Pichai indicated that Google expects to maintain an ongoing working relationship with Dean and Ghemawat through investment, cloud services and research collaboration.
Google said the leadership transition positions the company to move faster on near-term AI development while giving Hassabis more time to address the long-range scientific and strategic questions associated with AGI.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’ve made extraordinary progress to deliver on our full AI stack. We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company. We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier. At the same time, there’s never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science.”
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet
“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.”
“In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters, and to advise Koray, Josh, and the GDM leads. As part of this transition, I’ll also be leaning into my role at Isomorphic, where we are making extremely rapid and promising progress, to accelerate our mission there even faster.”
Demis Hassabis, Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet
