Google DeepMind is getting a new operating chief. Demis Hassabis, the unit’s co-founder and long-time chief executive, is relinquishing daily control of the AI lab and moving into the newly created posts of DeepMind chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, the company confirmed in early August. Taking over the CEO’s operational duties is Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s former chief technology officer, who becomes senior vice president of Google DeepMind and will report directly to Alphabet and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai.
The reshuffle lands at a tense moment for Alphabet’s AI ambitions. Google has faced setbacks in rolling out its next flagship Gemini model, and rivals OpenAI and Anthropic continue to pull talent and attention from the Mountain View giant. DeepMind has also seen a string of senior departures in recent months, including Gemini co-architect Noam Shazeer earlier this year. In the same announcement, Alphabet disclosed that Jeff Dean, a nearly three-decade Google veteran and one of its most senior AI researchers, is exiting to start a new company focused on automating scientific and machine-learning research, alongside several other longtime Google researchers.
Executives framed the leadership change as a deliberate handoff rather than a response to any single stumble, with Pichai stressing the need to move faster and stay competitive at the frontier of AI development. Kavukcuoglu, who has spent years overseeing DeepMind’s research infrastructure and had an increasingly visible hand in recent model launches, is seen internally as a steady operator capable of running the unit’s expanding day-to-day workload.
For Hassabis, the shift frees him to concentrate on longer-horizon priorities: setting strategy for Alphabet’s pursuit of artificial general intelligence and deepening his involvement with Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed venture applying AI models to drug discovery. Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and was awarded a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the protein-folding system AlphaFold, has increasingly described AI-driven medicine as one of the technology’s most consequential applications. His new chief scientist role gives him a mandate across all of Alphabet’s AI efforts, even as he cedes the operational reins of the lab he built.