Google DeepMind Overhauls Leadership Amid AI Struggles

Google's AI division DeepMind is undergoing a major reshuffle after its founder and CEO Demis Hassabis stepped aside to an advisory role. Hassabis will now serve as chair of DeepMind and take on a new position as chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company.

The move comes amidst a broader restructuring effort by Google in the AI space, with the goal of catching up to industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic. In a note to staff, Hassabis stated that he believed artificial general intelligence (AGI) is 'close at hand' and decided to switch roles 'so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.'

Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer, will take over as the head of DeepMind in a senior vice president position. Hassabis had been shifting day-to-day responsibility for Gemini, Google's struggling frontier AI model, to Kavukcuoglu for at least a year.