Demis Hassabis steps down as Google DeepMind CEO; Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years

Google has overhauled the leadership of its most important AI division in a sweeping restructuring that sees Demis Hassabis step back from the chief executive role he has held since the company's inception, Jeff Dean depart after 27 years, and a new generation of leaders take charge of its Gemini program.

Hassabis hands over the reins — but stays close

Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman — now CEO of Microsoft AI — before Google acquired the lab in 2014. In the decade-plus since, he transformed it into one of the world's most influential research organisations, overseeing breakthroughs from AlphaFold to AlphaGo and, more recently, the Gemini family of large language models. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for DeepMind's protein-structure work.

He is now stepping back from day-to-day management to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, a role designed to let him focus entirely on the long arc of AGI research and science rather than quarterly model releases. "We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history," Hassabis wrote in a note to staff. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand." He will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the DeepMind spin-off using AI to accelerate drug discovery.

Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational command

Replacing Hassabis on day-to-day operations is Koray Kavukcuoglu, who has been at DeepMind for 13 years and most recently served as its Chief Technology Officer and Google's Chief AI Architect. He becomes Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.

Kavukcuoglu is not a name well-known outside the AI research community, but his credentials are formidable: he led the teams that produced WaveNet, the deep-learning speech synthesis model that became the basis of Google Assistant's voice, and DQN, the deep reinforcement learning system that first mastered Atari games. "Koray and I have been working together for over 13 years," Hassabis said. "He is one of the world's foremost AI experts and I have total confidence in him."

Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop

Perhaps the most striking departure in the announcement is Jeff Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as one of its first engineers, helped architect its early search infrastructure and distributed systems, co-created TensorFlow, and spent the last several years as Chief Scientist shaping the company's AI strategy. He is leaving alongside Sanjay Ghemawat — his longtime collaborator and a fellow Google Senior Fellow — as well as Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research at DeepMind and co-lead on Gemini, and Quoc Le, another senior AI researcher.

Together they are founding Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation with the mission to automate the machine learning and scientific research cycle: running thousands of parallel experiments to accelerate discoveries in chip design, biology, drug discovery, and materials science. Alphabet is a founding investor and Cloud partner and plans to collaborate on a research framework for ML systems infrastructure. The arrangement is striking — Google is funding the very people it just lost, betting their work will eventually flow back.

The context: pressure on Gemini

The timing is pointed. While Google Cloud revenue surged 82 percent year-over-year to $24.8 billion in Q2 2026, the company is spending at an extraordinary rate — it is forecasting between $195 billion and $205 billion in capital expenditure this year. Bloomberg reported in July that the flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model missed its June release target after falling short of internal quality benchmarks, adding urgency to the question of whether Google is executing at the pace its investment demands.

The Gemini app has reached 950 million monthly users and Gemma open models have surpassed 900 million downloads. But competitors including Anthropic, OpenAI, and the growing Chinese labs have been moving quickly. By elevating Kavukcuoglu — a technical leader steeped in model development — to run DeepMind directly under Pichai, Google is signalling that it wants faster execution on the model front, while Hassabis focuses on the longer-horizon scientific and AGI questions that may define the decade.

Hassabis closed his note to the team with a phrase that read more like a mission statement than a farewell: "As a business we are in an incredibly strong position. We are the only company that has the full stack and we're world-class at every layer from infrastructure." Kavukcuoglu now has to make that claim stick.

Sources: Official announcement on blog.google; additional reporting from Gizmodo and 9to5Google.