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Demis Hassabis steps back from running Google DeepMind
Hassabis will move into a chair role and become Alphabet chief scientist, while DeepMind’s senior vice-president Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as the unit’s non-CEO executive lead.
Google DeepMind is entering a new leadership phase after Demis Hassabis said he will relinquish day-to-day duties as chief executive and take the role of chair. Hassabis will also become chief scientist at DeepMind’s parent, Alphabet, as reported by the Guardian Business.
DeepMind, the Nobel prize-winning AI unit Hassabis co-founded and later sold to Google in 2014, has been associated with major research advances including AlphaGo, which mastered the board game Go, and AlphaFold, which predicts the 3D structure of proteins. The Guardian Business notes that AlphaFold helped drive Hassabis’s role in the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry.
A former Google executive cited by the outlet said the change signals DeepMind being brought more closely into alignment with Google’s operations in Mountain View, California. The Guardian Business also says DeepMind will now be run by Hassabis’s longtime colleague, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will take the non-CEO role of senior vice-president of DeepMind.
The outlet further reports that the former executive expressed concern about DeepMind losing independence, adding that it could be difficult for Google and Hassabis that later versions of Google’s Gemini model lineup have lost ground to rival models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Hassabis said he plans to focus on the broader direction of AI and believes he is handing over operational management of a unit positioned for ongoing competitive battles.