Hassabis Steps Back at DeepMind Amid Leadership Reshuffle

Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day leadership of DeepMind, Google's primary AI research laboratory. The move comes as part of a sweeping leadership reshuffle that wiped over $185 billion from Alphabet's market capitalization on Wednesday.

Hassabis will become the chief scientist of Alphabet and chair of DeepMind, while Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as DeepMind's operational lead and becomes a senior vice president at Google DeepMind. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X that he couldn't 'imagine a better person' than Hassabis for the role.

The reshuffle coincides with several high-profile departures, including Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, who is leaving to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on accelerating discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. Google will participate as a founding investor and cloud partner.

Several other colleagues are also leaving with Dean, while Noam Shazeer and John Jumper previously left for OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively. Investors remain confident about Alphabet's position in AI, with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla saying that Google has been the 'real source of AI acceleration'.