Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis moves to Alphabet chief scientist role; Jeff Dean exits after 27 years to launch AI-for-science startup Discovery Loop.

Google Deepmind is undergoing a significant leadership transformation. Demis Hassabis is stepping away from day-to-day operations to become Alphabet's Chief Scientist, while chief scientist Jeff Dean is departing the company after 27 years to launch his own AI venture.

Hassabis has long pursued artificial general intelligence and now believes it is "close at hand," having previously described humanity as "standing in the foothills of the singularity." The CEO described this transition as "a pivotal moment in human history" and said the move will afford him more time to focus on "the big picture." He will continue collaborating closely with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on "strategic and global AGI matters" while advising Deepmind's teams. Based at the company's London headquarters, Hassabis will also dedicate greater attention to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery subsidiary, reflecting his conviction that "the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health."

Koray Kavukcuoglu will assume day-to-day management of Google Deepmind as senior vice president, reporting directly to Pichai. Previously serving as Deepmind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app, and Google's AI developer platforms. He joined Deepmind in its early days and has collaborated with Hassabis for over 13 years. According to Pichai, Kavukcuoglu built Deepmind's deep learning team and drove major breakthroughs including WaveNet and DQN. Hassabis expressed "total confidence" in Kavukcuoglu and the broader leadership team.

Dean is joining Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat to establish Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation designed to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate scientific discovery. The venture will initially focus on automating large-scale machine learning experiments, with plans to extend this approach across diverse scientific and engineering domains. Anthropic and OpenAI have similarly integrated faster, more automated scientific research into their broader AI strategies.

Dean and Ghemawat were instrumental in building Google's early search infrastructure and later developed neural networks that, in Pichai's assessment, "helped create the modern AI era." The company's co-founders also include Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, both veteran Google AI researchers. Vinyals led AlphaStar's development—the system that defeated professional StarCraft II players—and recently co-led the Gemini team at Google Deepmind. Quoc Le pioneered deep learning at Google, co-founded Google Brain, and helped develop sequence-to-sequence models that became foundational to modern machine translation. The four founders have worked together for periods spanning 14 to 30 years.

Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are leading the seed round, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital, and Alphabet. The funding round is anticipated to close within the coming weeks, with Alphabet remaining involved as Discovery Loop's cloud partner and planning to collaborate on a research framework for machine learning systems and infrastructure.

Dean has posted a farewell message on X thanking his colleagues: "It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time." Notably, the announcement does not thank Google or reference his 27 years at the company—an unusual omission for a departure of this magnitude, as high-profile tech exits typically include carefully crafted farewell statements. The oversight suggests underlying tensions as Google confronts mounting pressure in AI, particularly in coding, where its leading models have fallen behind those from OpenAI and Anthropic. The company is banking on Gemini 4, a "much larger" foundation model currently in training, to narrow that gap, though no release timeline has been announced.