Hassabis moves to chair as Jeff Dean leaves Google

Google announced a change at the top of its AI organization. Demis Hassabis is stepping back from running Google DeepMind day to day and moving into two new roles: chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai's message frames this as a shift toward long-term AGI strategy, and Hassabis keeps his position at the drug-discovery spinout Isomorphic Labs.

The person who now holds the operational reins is Koray Kavukcuoglu, promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind. He will oversee Gemini model development, frontier research, and the Gemini app, while keeping his job as Google's chief AI architect. He has been at DeepMind for 13 years and worked on early results like WaveNet and DQN, so this is an insider taking over, not an outside hire.

The bigger surprise is Jeff Dean leaving after 27 years. Dean, who built much of the infrastructure that made Google's search and machine learning possible, is starting an independent public benefit corporation with his longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, aimed at speeding up machine learning and scientific discovery. Two of Google's most senior systems engineers are walking out the door together.

Why it matters

If you build on Gemini or track where Google's AI is headed, the practical decision-maker is now Kavukcuoglu, and the research agenda sits with Hassabis at arm's length. Dean's exit also signals that even Google's most established engineers see room to build something new outside it.