London, United Kingdom. Alphabet has reshaped the leadership of its artificial intelligence operations, appointing Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis as group-wide chief scientist and chairman of Google DeepMind. Four senior figures behind Gemini are also leaving to establish their own company.
New role for Hassabis
Hassabis, who has Greek Cypriot roots through his father’s family from Famagusta, will step back from his main managerial duties at Google DeepMind while remaining involved in the laboratory’s research and long-term strategy.
The London-born scientist received the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on AlphaFold. He linked the move to the increasing proximity of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which refers to computer systems demonstrating intelligence comparable to humans across a broad range of tasks.
Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said he and Hassabis had long discussed a role that would allow him to focus fully on shaping the future of AGI.
“This is a vital piece of work for Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t think of a better person to take on this task than Demis,” Pichai said.
Kavukcuoglu takes operational role
Google DeepMind chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu will take responsibility for the unit’s daily operations as senior vice-president, rather than chief executive. He will retain his position as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.
Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and teams responsible for the Gemini application and developer products. He has worked at DeepMind for 13 years and previously led research behind technologies including WaveNet and the deep reinforcement-learning system DQN.
Gemini delay and investor concerns
The changes come as the most powerful version of Google’s latest Gemini model remains unreleased, despite an initial June launch date. The delay has raised investor concerns that Google could lose ground to OpenAI and Anthropic, which both recruited senior Google researchers this summer.
Alphabet shares fell 4 per cent following Wednesday’s announcement.
A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that senior Google Cloud executives welcomed the restructuring. The source said Kavukcuoglu had been more closely involved than Hassabis in cooperation between the research laboratory and Google’s main AI revenue business, potentially moving Google DeepMind in a more product-focused direction.
