Google DeepMind CEO Sir Demis Hassabis has stepped down in a shake-up at one of the world’s most influential AI labs. Hassabis will become chair of DeepMind, which he founded, and also take on the role of chief scientist of parent company Alphabet, the company announced on Wednesday.
DeepMind will now be led by Hassabis’s former lieutenant Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will be senior vice-president of Google DeepMind. The moves suggest that DeepMind will be absorbed into Google’s broader business. Current chief scientist and longtime Google employee Jeff Dean is also leaving the group to found his own start-up, which Google will back.
Hassabis told staff he was stepping back from day-to-day management in order to focus on the “big picture” and to influence the direction of increasingly powerful artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
“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.” He said.
Google DeepMind developed AlphaGo, the first AI system to beat human experts at the board game Go, and AlphaFold, the Nobel Prize-winning project on predicting the structures of proteins. Although Google has been positioned to dominate in the race to build powerful AI systems, it has lagged behind younger and less-resourced AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, particularly in building AI coding agents.
Hassabis has said he wants to address the bigger questions around the implications of artificial general intelligence, including leading work on shaping future AI regulations. Stepping into the chair position would give him more space to think through this, rather than focusing on the day-to-day operations.
