Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO, takes chairman role

Google DeepMind is restructuring at a moment of intensifying competitive pressure in AI development. The company faces a convergence of setbacks: Gemini 3.5 Pro, its next flagship model, is months behind the original June launch target, and it has lost prominent researchers to rivals—Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and John Jumper, a Nobel laureate, to Anthropic. These departures and delays appear to be driving the leadership reshuffle. Hassabis's shift from CEO to chairman and chief scientist reflects a reorientation of his own focus toward long-term AGI strategy and applied work at Isomorphic Labs rather than managing day-to-day operations. The transfer of operational control to Kavukcuoglu, who will report directly to Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, streamlines the organizational hierarchy and may be intended to accelerate Gemini model development.

The concurrent departure of Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and its chief scientist, signals a broader restlessness among senior technologists at the company. Dean's move to cofound Discovery Loop—backed by Alphabet as a founding investor—suggests he seeks the freedom to pursue research directions outside the constraints of a public company's financial incentives. In his note to staff, he cited the opportunity to operate independently on machine learning, science, and engineering automation. Despite these losses, Alphabet CEO Pichai affirmed in a note to staff that Google retains "the talent, compute, and distribution to compete," though the stock market's 5% decline on the announcement suggests investor skepticism about the strategy.