Google reshuffles AI leadership; Demis Hassabis becomes Alphabet chief scientist

New Delhi: Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced a leadership restructuring at Google DeepMind, moving Demis Hassabis into a strategic role as chair of the AI unit and chief scientist of Alphabet. Hassabis will hand over his day-to-day operational responsibilities at Google DeepMind and focus on the development and broader implications of artificial general intelligence. He will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI drug-discovery company, and advise Google’s model and research teams. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently chief technology officer of Google DeepMind and Google’s chief AI architect, will take charge of the unit as senior vice-president. He will report to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app and developer teams. He has spent 13 years at DeepMind and previously worked on technologies including WaveNet and Deep Q-Networks. Pichai said the changes were intended to accelerate Google’s work on commercial AI products while allowing Hassabis to concentrate on AGI and science. “We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier. At the same time, there’s never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science,” Pichai said in a message to employees. Hassabis said he believed AGI was “close at hand” and that the transition would give him more time to work on strategic and global AI issues. He will continue working with Pichai and advising Google DeepMind’s leadership. He also said the company was making progress on new models, including Gemini 4. Google did not provide details on the model or its release timeline in the announcement. The restructuring comes as Google reports growing adoption of its AI products. The Gemini app has crossed 950 million monthly users, while Google’s Gemma family of open models has recorded more than 900 million downloads. Pichai also cited demand for Gemini among businesses and developers, along with AI-led growth across Search, YouTube and Google Cloud. Separately, Google senior fellows Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat will leave their existing roles to launch an independent public-benefit corporation focused on machine learning, science and engineering. Alphabet will be a founding investor and Google Cloud will serve as a technology partner. Google also plans to collaborate with the new company on research related to machine-learning systems and infrastructure. Dean leaves his current role after 27 years at Google.