Demis Hassabis isn’t leaving Google, but he is stepping away from his role as CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI lab he co-founded in 2010 and sold to Google in 2014.
Hassabis becomes Chairman of DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to his existing position as CEO of Isomorphic Labs (an AI-first drug design and development company he founded in 2021).
In a message to the team, Hassabis wrote: “We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.
“With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.”
Koray Kavukcuoglu, SVP, Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect, Google, will assume the leadership role at DeepMind reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google.
There are many layers to these changes, which we will unpack on Episode 230 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
Jeff Dean Exits to Co-Found Discovery Loop
Hassabis' move wasn’t the only massive change at Google this week. Legendary Google executive Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years to launch a startup with other former Google leaders.
Dean, who most recently served as Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, joined Google in 1999 as the 30th employee.
He co-founded the Google Brain AI team in 2011 (which merged with Google DeepMind in 2023), and has played an instrumental role in many innovations at Google during his tenure, including: Google Search, TensorFlow, Google Translate, Gemini, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Google Ads, and Google News.
Dean posted on X:
“I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators Sanjay Ghemawat (@Sanjay_Ghemawat), Oriol Vinyals (@OriolVinyalsML) and Quoc Le (@quocleix), we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.”
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