Alphabet reshuffles AI leadership as Hassabis takes new role

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a memo to staff that the change would allow Hassabis to focus more directly on artificial general intelligence (AGI), a stage of AI development in which computer systems could match human-level reasoning.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer, will take over day-to-day management of the division. He will hold the title of senior vice president rather than CEO, in addition to his existing role as Alphabet's chief AI architect, the company said.

The changes also included the departure of several senior figures from Google's Gemini team, including longtime engineering leader Jeff Dean, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. The four have launched a new venture called Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on research in machine learning, science and engineering. Alphabet has invested in the company and signed a cloud computing partnership with it.

The reorganization comes as Google faces mounting pressure in AI development. The company's next flagship Gemini model, originally expected in June, has yet to be released, prompting questions among investors and industry observers about Google's pace of AI development relative to competitors such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Both companies have recently hired prominent researchers away from Google, including Noam Shazeer, who joined OpenAI in June, and Nobel laureate John Jumper, who moved to Anthropic the same month.

In his memo, Hassabis pointed to what he described as strong progress on Google's AI models, including an unreleased update known as Gemini 4. He said he would also spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company he founded that originated from DeepMind, adding that improving human health has long been what he considers AI's most important application.

Alphabet did not specify what prompted the changes or their timing. A company spokesperson said Hassabis would have few direct reports going forward, focusing instead on research and strategy tied to the broader societal impact of AGI.

Hassabis, who received a Nobel Prize in 2024, co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued leading the lab from London after Google acquired it for roughly $650 million in 2014. Dean co-founded Google Brain, a U.S.-based research unit, in 2011 and was known for major infrastructure work alongside Ghemawat. The two units merged in 2023 to form Google DeepMind, with Hassabis named CEO and Dean appointed chief scientist.

Under the leadership of Dean, Vinyals and Shazeer, Google released Gemini 3 last November, a model widely viewed in the industry as narrowing the gap with rival AI developers. Since then, however, new releases from competitors and the emergence of lower-cost open-source models from Chinese developers have added to the pressure on Google. At the company's developer conference in May, executives highlighted Gemini's cost efficiency rather than claiming it led the field in performance.

Earlier, Qazinform reported on the World Bank's World Development Report 2026: The Promise of AI, which said artificial intelligence could become a powerful driver of economic growth and improved public services in developing countries.