Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis steps down, shifts to chairman and chief scientist role

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and long-time CEO of Google DeepMind, is relinquishing the role of CEO but will remain with the organization. According to the announcement, Hassabis will transition to chairman of DeepMind and will also serve as chief scientist for Alphabet, Google's parent company. He will additionally continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the pharmaceutical-focused spinoff that applies AI to drug discovery.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently CTO of DeepMind, will become senior vice president and report directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will take responsibility for day-to-day operations.

The leadership changes coincide with a notable departure. Jeff Dean, who held the role of chief scientist at Google, is leaving to create a startup called Discovery Loop. Several colleagues are joining him, and Google is making an unspecified investment in the venture while also serving as its cloud provider. Discovery Loop is working on AI models that can improve themselves with minimal or no human oversight. Dean told The New York Times that there is an opportunity for AI to further automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop.

DeepMind has also restructured its AlphaFold team, which was disbanded. Some staff were reassigned, while others left. AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences in minutes—work that previously could take years—has contributed to research on therapies for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

In a separate development, Google announced plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic. The company has already invested $10 billion in April, with an additional $30 billion to follow if Anthropic meets specific performance milestones.