Google Overhauls AI Leadership as Longtime Chief Scientist Joins Wave of Exits
Demis Hassabis becomes chairman of Google DeepMind while Jeff Dean leaves to launch AI-discovery startup
- Demis Hassabis will become chairman of Google DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu is taking on responsibility for all AI-model development.
- Jeff Dean is leaving Google to launch Discovery Loop, an artificial-intelligence startup focused on automating scientific research.
- Google veterans Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving Google to join Jeff Dean at Discovery Loop.
Google announced new leadership of its artificial-intelligence operations Wednesday, a shake-up that follows a wave of high-profile departures and delays in releasing a model on par with top offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become chairman and chief scientist, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X. Google DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu is taking on responsibility for all AI-model development, and Jeff Dean, Google’s current chief scientist, is leaving with three other company veterans to co-found a new AI startup.
Google’s early investments in AI research and infrastructure—which stretch back more than a decade—and its massive base of consumer and enterprise users haven’t translated into a consistently dominant position in the market for the new technology. The company vaulted ahead in the race to develop powerful frontier AI models with an updated version of Gemini last fall. Since then, it has struggled to keep pace with competitors’ capability advances as measured by widely used benchmark tests.
“We have to continue to move fast with clear purpose here,” Pichai said in a blog post about the leadership changes. “We are committed to being at the frontier and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve.”
In addition to Dean’s departure, the company has also lost other top talent. Noam Shazeer, co-author of a 2017 paper on transformer architecture that galvanized AI development, and John Jumper, who shared in the AlphaFold Nobel Prize in 2024, both left in recent months for OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively. Meanwhile, Google still hasn’t released its newest frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro.
Investors have shown signs of impatience, sending its shares down 7% two weeks ago after the company said it would boost AI spending without giving an update on when the new model would be released. Google’s stock recovered, but on Wednesday, it dropped almost 4% after the leadership changes were announced.
In addition to his new chairman role, Hassabis will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, an AI drug discovery startup that was spun out of Google DeepMind and is under Google’s parent company Alphabet GOOGL -3.98%decrease; red down pointing triangle.
Dean, who joined Google as its 30th employee in 1999, will be CEO at a new public-benefit corporation called Discovery Loop that aims to accelerate technology by automating complicated, multistep science and engineering tasks.
Joining Dean in the endeavor are fellow Google veterans Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat, who between them account for high-profile advances in mathematics and protein structure and are some of the most cited researchers in the world.
The startup will initially focus on automating the process of machine-learning research and engineering via its own internal technology stack. Eventually, it plans to apply its technology to a variety of areas, including hardware design, drug discovery and global challenges such as clean energy, according to a news release.
“We think by automating many of the classical experimental-loop aspects with machine-learning models, augmenting human scientists and engineers, we’ll be able to make it possible to explore more space in broad science areas to accelerate discovery,” Dean said in an interview at his Palo Alto, Calif., home Tuesday.
Alphabet is providing cloud and computing capacity to Discovery Loop and is an investor in the company, the news release said. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading its seed round. The round isn’t closed, and the startup declined to share its valuation.
Dean said he began seriously contemplating the startup five weeks ago and contacted Vinyals, a longtime colleague and main contributor to AlphaFold, a famous AI program that predicts protein structures and that won the Nobel Prize in 2024. They then connected with Le and Ghemawat and started discussing building the infrastructure to allow more kinds of science to be automated and what would be needed to do that.
The four have known each other for more than a decade. Dean co-founded Google Brain, the company’s pioneering AI deep-learning research team, in 2011. Le was a founding member of Google Brain and Vinyals joined it two years later.
Ghemawat was also an early Google employee. Alongside Dean, he helped create Google’s distributed systems in the early 2000s, and in 2012 he and Dean were recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery for their efforts.
The scientists decided they needed to leave Google to pursue their new mission.
“We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now,” Ghemawat said, explaining that Google’s infrastructure works well for big consumer apps, large ad systems and search. But, he said, it has “very different requirements than the type of infrastructure we want to build for research.”
Pichai said that Dean and Ghemawat helped drive some of the company’s most significant technology transitions over their 27-year tenure and that he wished them the best.
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