Demis Hassabis Hands Over Day-to-Day Management of Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day management of Google’s artificial intelligence division to become chairman of DeepMind. At the same time, he will become chief scientist at the parent company, Alphabet, according to The Guardian World.
Operational leadership of DeepMind will pass to Hassabis’s longtime colleague, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who is based in the U.S. He will assume the role of senior vice president at DeepMind, rather than CEO. Hassabis stated that he intends to focus more on the overall strategy for the development of artificial intelligence and scientific breakthroughs involving its use.
Hassabis founded DeepMind and sold the company to Google in 2014. Under his leadership, the team created AlphaGo, which mastered the Chinese board game Go, as well as AlphaFold for predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins. For his work on AlphaFold, Hassabis was a co-recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In a comment to the publication, the former Google executive described the personnel changes as a move toward closer integration of London-based DeepMind into the structure of its parent company in Mountain View, California. In his view, commercial objectives are increasingly dominating the work of the labs. He also claimed that the latest versions of the Gemini series models have fallen behind compared to developments from Anthropic and OpenAI.
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The new Gemini 3.5 Pro model has not yet been unveiled. According to reports cited by The Guardian World, its release has been delayed due to efforts to improve the model’s ability to write code. A Google spokesperson denied that the personnel changes were related to Gemini’s performance and stated that Hassabis had been considering this move for some time.
Along with the personnel changes, DeepMind’s chief scientist and Google veteran Jeff Dean announced his departure. Together with three other leading researchers, he is founding the startup Discovery Loop. Google denies claims of a talent retention crisis and points out that employee turnover among AI workers in the first half of the year was lower than last year.
DeepMind employees have also expressed concerns about Google’s collaboration with the Pentagon. Previously, a former employee filed a legal challenge against Google, alleging unfair dismissal due to his views on Gaza. Google has stated that it supports an approach whereby AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without proper human oversight.
