DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis steps aside amid Google leadership shake-up

Google has lost four key AI staffers to a startup and shuffled leadership at DeepMind as part of a company-wide shake-up.

Alphabet announced a series of changes in its AI division this week, including the departure of Jeff Dean, who is taking a trio of colleagues to form a startup.

Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, is stepping aside from leading the AI unit to become chief scientist of Alphabet, shifting his focus to longer-term projects.

The moves weren't welcomed by markets, with Alphabet's share price sliding 4% amid wider concerns that Google is on the backfoot when it comes to AI.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back on concerns last month after the company posted record results in its cloud division. Google has lost top AI employees to Anthropic and OpenAI in recent months.

Demis Hassabis steps back from DeepMind

The changes will see Demis Hassabis, the Nobel-prize winning co-founder of DeepMind step back from his company, which was bought by Google in 2014 for an estimated $650 million.

In a memo confirming the changes, Hassabis said he will set aside “day-to-day operational responsibilities” to have more “time and space” for “big picture” projects.

Hassabis has recently discussed work on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), and reiterated his belief that the main application of AI should be improving human health, such as curing diseases like cancer.

"Demis has described us as standing in the foothills of the singularity, and has been spending a lot of his time engaging externally," Pichai said in a memo sent to employees and published by the company.

"He and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI. It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it."

Hassabis will remain as chair of DeepMind, which will now be led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, who has been promoted from his role as chief technology officer (CTO) at the division to senior vice president.

Google spinout

Alongside Hassabis' role change, Google confirmed the departure of Jeff Dean, who has led AI efforts at the company for nearly three decades.

Dean and engineering colleague Sanjay Ghemawat have founded machine learning (ML) company Discovery Loop, which aims to automate scientific experiments.

Pichai said the duo have helped drive “some of the most significant technology transitions” in the company’s history, from “early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era”.

While they've taken two other Google co-workers with them – DeepMind VP of research and technical lead at Gemini Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain cofounder Quoc Le – their former employer is investing in the public-benefit project.

"We’ll continue to work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances," Pichai said.

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