Hassabis Hands Off DeepMind CEO Job to Chase AGI

Demis Hassabis is done running Google DeepMind day-to-day. He moves to Chair of Google DeepMind and a newly created Chief Scientist of Alphabet role, keeping his CEO seat at Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery spinout. His framing: "I've been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment..." Semafor reports he'd been quietly stepping back from CEO duties for about a year already.

Koray Kavukcuoglu takes the operational wheel as SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting straight to Sundar Pichai. He owns Gemini model development, frontier research, and the Gemini app and developer teams — a 13-year DeepMind veteran who was CTO and Google's Chief AI Architect.

The bigger shock in the same announcement: Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years, along with Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation. Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are going with them. Google stays on as founding investor and cloud partner — which softens it, but four of the most decorated names in AI research just walked out of the same building.

Why it matters: Google's AI org just swapped its scientist-founders for operators, betting that the Gemini era needs shipping more than it needs invention.