Google DeepMind is losing its chief executive and chief scientist at the same time. Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day operations to take a role as Alphabet’s Chief Scientist, while Jeff Dean is leaving the company after 27 years to launch his own AI venture.
Hassabis told staff the move would allow him to concentrate on “the big picture.” In a message to employees, he called this “a pivotal moment in human history.” He stated he has spent his life working toward artificial general intelligence and now believes it is “close at hand,” previously describing humanity as “standing in the foothills of the singularity.”
Hassabis will continue to work closely with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on “strategic and global AGI matters” while advising DeepMind’s teams. He will remain based at the company’s London headquarters and also devote more time to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI drug discovery subsidiary. Hassabis has said that “the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health.”
Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over day-to-day management of Google DeepMind. He previously served as DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect. As senior vice president of Google DeepMind, Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Pichai and oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app, and Google’s AI developer platforms.
Kavukcuoglu joined DeepMind in its early days and has worked with Hassabis for more than 13 years. Pichai said Kavukcuoglu built DeepMind’s deep learning team and helped drive breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN. Hassabis said he has “total confidence” in Kavukcuoglu and the rest of the leadership team.
Jeff Dean is leaving Google to automate scientific research
Google DeepMind is also losing Jeff Dean, one of the most influential engineers in the company’s history. After 27 years at Google, Dean is joining Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that plans to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to speed up scientific discovery.
Discovery Loop will initially focus on automating large-scale machine learning experiments. The founders eventually plan to apply the same approach across a wide range of scientific and engineering fields. Anthropic and OpenAI have also made faster, more automated scientific research part of their broader AI plans.
Dean and Ghemawat helped build Google’s early search infrastructure and later worked on the neural networks that, in Pichai’s words, “helped create the modern AI era.” Discovery Loop’s other co-founders are Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, two other longtime Google AI researchers. Dean said the four founders have worked together for periods ranging from 14 to 30 years.
Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are leading the seed round, with backing from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital, and Alphabet. The round is expected to close in the coming weeks. Alphabet will remain involved as Discovery Loop’s cloud partner and plans to work with the startup on a research framework for machine learning systems and infrastructure.
Dean’s announcement on X does not thank Google or mention his 27 years at the company. Prominent tech departures usually come with carefully prepared farewell statements, making the omission unusual. It suggests there may be more to Dean’s exit as Google faces mounting pressure in AI, particularly in coding, where its best models have fallen behind those from OpenAI and Anthropic. Google is counting on Gemini 4, a “much larger” foundation model now in training, to close that gap. The company has not announced a release date.
What it means
The departure of Hassabis and Dean signals a shift in how Google approaches its own AI strategy. Hassabis is moving to a higher-level advisory role, which changes the day-to-day operations for the teams building models like Gemini. Kavukcuoglu takes the helm, bringing experience from the early days of deep learning at the company.
Dean’s exit to start Discovery Loop highlights a growing trend where top engineers are leaving to build infrastructure for scientific discovery rather than just training models. For researchers, this means new tools for automating experiments are coming from outside Google’s internal labs.
