Google‘s shares fell as much as 6% on Wednesday as a sweeping DeepMind leadership shake-up unsettled investors, with Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis moving sideways to become Alphabet’s chief scientist and veteran researcher Jeff Dean departing to launch his own company.
Hassabis steps back from DeepMind as Kavukcuoglu takes the helm
In a post on the Google official blog, chief executive Sundar Pichai confirmed that Koray Kavukcuoglu will assume leadership of Google DeepMind as SVP, adding that role to his existing position as Chief AI Architect of Google and reporting directly to Pichai.
Kavukcuoglu has been at DeepMind for approximately 13 years. He founded Google’s deep learning team and led the development of WaveNet, a generative audio model, and DQN, a reinforcement learning algorithm, according to Investopedia. He will now oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.
Hassabis, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, cited the proximity of artificial general intelligence as the reason for his shift. In his new role as Alphabet chief scientist, he will focus on research and strategy related to the societal impacts of AGI and will carry few direct reports, Reuters reported.
In his internal memo, Hassabis described ‘great progress’ on Google’s AI models, including an unreleased upgrade referred to as Gemini 4. Reuters also reported that Hassabis said he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind and which he founded and continues to lead as chief executive.
Jeff Dean’s departure and the DeepMind leadership shake-up’s wider talent story
Dean’s exit is a significant personnel event in its own right. He and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation called Discovery Loop, focused on accelerating discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering, with Google providing support, according to the Google blog.
The founding team also includes Google DeepMind VP of research Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain founding member Quoc Le, giving the four co-founders a combined estimated 60 to 90 years of Google tenure, according to Pinggy.
The startup is aiming to raise $1 billion at a valuation of around $10 billion, with its initial funding round led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, and participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. Alphabet is both a founding investor and cloud partner, Business Insider reported.
The departures come at a charged moment for Alphabet. The company has recently faced investor scrutiny over its capital expenditure trajectory: in the latest quarter, Google turned cash flow negative for the first time on record owing to its capex commitments, while forecasting full-year capex of up to $205 billion, according to CNBC.
Alphabet was among the tech companies penalised by investors this earnings season for its elevated capex outlook, even as rivals including Microsoft and Amazon were rewarded by markets for similar spending. The pattern has kept investors acutely sensitive to anything that might affect the company’s competitive position in AI.
The company does have operational momentum to point to. Google’s cloud division, run by Thomas Kurian, posted sales of $24.77 billion in its most recent quarter, up 82% year over year and ahead of analyst expectations of $24.56 billion, compared with $13.6 billion in the prior year, according to Yahoo Finance. CNBC also reported that Google’s cloud division is expanding at a faster pace than larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The question now is whether Kavukcuoglu’s promotion and Hassabis’s repositioning represent a coherent strategic evolution or an unsettling of the leadership continuity that investors had come to rely on. Hassabis had been widely tipped as a potential future chief executive of Alphabet; the move into a research-focused role effectively takes him out of that running.
The Gemini 4 release, whenever it arrives, will be Kavukcuoglu’s first major test in the top seat at DeepMind and the clearest early signal of whether this reorganisation has strengthened or disrupted Google’s AI development pipeline.