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Demis Hassabis steps back as Google DeepMind CEO, Jeff Dean departs to launch Discovery Loop

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Demis Hassabis steps back as Google DeepMind CEO, Jeff Dean departs to launch Discovery Loop

Google DeepMind is resetting its top leadership. Demis Hassabis is stepping away from day-to-day operations as the unit's CEO to become Alphabet's Chief Scientist, a role he says will let him focus on "the big picture." In a message to staff he called the moment "a pivotal moment in human history," said he now believes artificial general intelligence is "close at hand," and repeated an earlier description of humanity as "standing in the foothills of the singularity." Hassabis is not leaving Alphabet: he will keep advising DeepMind's teams, work with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on "strategic and global AGI matters," stay based at the company's London headquarters, and spend more time on Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery subsidiary; he has said "the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health."

Day-to-day management of DeepMind passes to Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously the unit's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, who has worked alongside Hassabis for more than 13 years. 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. Pichai credited him with building DeepMind's deep learning team and helping drive breakthroughs including WaveNet and DQN; Hassabis said he has "total confidence" in Kavukcuoglu and the rest of the leadership team.

Separately, Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the company after 27 years. He is joining Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that plans to automate machine learning, science and engineering work to speed up scientific discovery; it will start by automating large-scale machine learning experiments before expanding into other scientific and engineering fields. Anthropic and OpenAI have both made faster, more automated scientific research part of their own AI plans too. Discovery Loop's other co-founders are Oriol Vinyals, who helped lead development of AlphaStar, the system that beat professional StarCraft II players, and who most recently co-led Google DeepMind's Gemini team, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain who helped develop the sequence-to-sequence models behind modern machine translation. Dean said the four founders have worked together for periods ranging from 14 to 30 years.

Discovery Loop's seed round is being led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital and Alphabet also investing; it is expected to close within weeks, and Alphabet will stay on as the startup's cloud partner while working with it on a research framework for machine learning systems and infrastructure. Dean's exit follows other senior AI departures from Google: Vinyals's fellow Gemini co-lead, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI in June, and longtime DeepMind researcher David Silver left the company in February. Dean 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," but the message did not thank Google by name or mention his 27-year tenure. The Decoder called that omission unusual for a high-profile departure and suggested, without confirmation, that there may be more behind Dean's exit at a time when Google faces competitive pressure in AI coding, where its models trail those from OpenAI and Anthropic; the company is counting on Gemini 4, described as a "much larger" foundation model now in training, to close that gap, though no release date has been announced.

Key facts

  • Demis Hassabis is stepping away from day-to-day operations as Google DeepMind's CEO to become Alphabet's Chief Scientist, staying in London, advising DeepMind's teams, working with CEO Sundar Pichai on "strategic and global AGI matters," and spending more time on Isomorphic Labs.
  • Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's former chief technology officer and Google's former chief AI architect who has worked with Hassabis for more than 13 years, becomes senior vice president running DeepMind day to day, including Gemini development, frontier research, the Gemini app and Google's AI developer platforms, reporting to Pichai.
  • Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, is leaving after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aiming to automate machine learning, science and engineering research, together with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le.
  • Discovery Loop's seed round is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital and Alphabet also investing; it is expected to close within weeks, and Alphabet stays on as the startup's cloud partner.
  • Dean's departure follows other senior exits, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI in June and DeepMind researcher David Silver in February; his farewell post on X thanked colleagues but did not mention Google or his 27-year tenure, an omission The Decoder called unusual.

Why it matters

Two of Google's most senior AI leaders are leaving their current posts at the same time. Hassabis moves out of DeepMind's day-to-day CEO role into a new Alphabet-wide Chief Scientist post built around AGI strategy, and Dean, one of the most influential engineers in Google's history, exits to build a company that tries to automate the process of research itself rather than ship another product. The reshuffle lands as Google faces competitive pressure in AI coding tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and as other senior researchers have already left: Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI in June, DeepMind's David Silver in February. Discovery Loop also joins a wider race, alongside plans already under way at Anthropic and OpenAI, to point AI at speeding up scientific discovery itself.

Who it affects

Google DeepMind staff now answer to Kavukcuoglu for day-to-day matters, including Gemini model development, frontier research, the Gemini app and Google's AI developer platforms; Hassabis keeps a strategic advisory role plus his existing tie to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's drug discovery subsidiary. The four Discovery Loop founders, Dean, Ghemawat, Vinyals and Le, have worked together for between 14 and 30 years, and their new venture pulls decades of Google's internal AI and infrastructure expertise into one outside company. The investors behind the new venture, Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital and Alphabet itself, get early exposure to an AI-for-science startup; Alphabet also keeps a stake in the outcome as Discovery Loop's cloud partner.

How to use it

There is no product to try here; the practical read is about who now runs what. Anyone dealing with Google DeepMind day to day, on partnerships, research collaborations or developer-platform questions, now goes through Kavukcuoglu rather than Hassabis. Investors or researchers tracking AI-for-science tools should watch for Discovery Loop's seed round to close in the coming weeks, led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures; no round size has been disclosed. Anyone assessing Google's standing in AI coding should watch for Gemini 4, the "much larger" model the company is counting on to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, though it has not set a release date.

How solid is it

The account rests on Google's own announcements and statements from Hassabis and Pichai, relayed by The Decoder, plus Dean's own farewell post on X: all primary sources close to the companies and people involved. The basics, who now reports to whom, who is joining Discovery Loop, and which firms are leading its funding, are stated directly rather than inferred. The softer material is thinner: no effective date is given for either move, no funding figure is disclosed for Discovery Loop, and the idea that "there may be more" behind Dean's exit is The Decoder's own reading of his farewell post, not a claim made by Dean or Google.

Risks and caveats

The framing that DeepMind "loses" its CEO is sharper than the body of the story supports: Hassabis is not leaving Alphabet or DeepMind, only its day-to-day operations, and he keeps advising the teams there. No dollar figure exists yet for Discovery Loop's seed round, and no year is given for when Shazeer or Silver left, only the month in each case. Whether Dean's low-key farewell reflects friction with Google, as The Decoder speculates, or is simply a personal choice is not established by anything in the source; treat that reading as informed speculation, not a confirmed reason for his departure.

“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.”

— Jeff Dean, farewell post on X