Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced leadership changes at Google DeepMind on Tuesday, saying Demis Hassabis will become chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet while Jeff Dean departs after 27 years. Pichai said Hassabis will focus on shaping the future of artificial general intelligence and continue leading Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently chief technology officer of Google DeepMind and chief AI architect, will step up as senior vice president of Google DeepMind reporting to Pichai, overseeing Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering, and Google will remain a founding investor and Cloud partner. Hassabis said in a message to employees that he will hand over day-to-day operational responsibilities to focus on the big picture and advise Kavukcuoglu, Josh Woodward, and other leads from new London offices. He said the Gemini models are in good hands with Kavukcuoglu and the leads, noting progress on new models including Gemini 4.