Google shakes up AI leadership as DeepMind chief shifts role

Google parent company Alphabet on Wednesday announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company. Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a company-wide memo that he and Hassabis had long discussed a role allowing him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of artificial general intelligence. Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities and hold the title of senior vice president of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet's chief AI architect. Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation and received investment from Google. Shares of Alphabet fell 4% after the news.