Google DeepMind Leadership Changes, Stock Falls
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down, and chief scientist Jeff Dean is departing after 27 years to co-found a startup. The announcements were made Wednesday, the same morning Alphabet's shares fell nearly 4%.
Google announced significant leadership changes within its AI division, Google DeepMind, on Wednesday. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO and will assume the role of chairman for Google DeepMind and chief scientist for Alphabet. Jeff Dean, a long-serving chief scientist at Google, is also leaving the company after 27 years to co-found a new startup.
The announcements came in a single memo from CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday morning. Following the news, shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, dropped nearly 4%. Hassabis will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI-driven drug discovery company. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer, will now oversee all AI model development.
Jeff Dean is launching Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating the research process, including experiment design, execution, and analysis. The company plans to start by automating machine learning research and engineering before expanding to hardware design, drug discovery, and clean energy.
The departures follow a pattern of high-profile exits from Google's AI teams. Several key researchers, including contributors to the foundational Transformer paper and Nobel laureate John Jumper, have recently left to join competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.