Google is restructuring its AI leadership, with Demis Hassabis stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind after leading the lab since 2010. In a message to staff on August 5, Alphabet confirmed Hassabis will become chairman of Google DeepMind and take on the newly created role of chief scientist at Alphabet, a shift the company frames as letting its co-founder concentrate on long-range research toward artificial general intelligence rather than running day-to-day operations.
Kavukcuoglu takes the wheel
Day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind moves to Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently the lab’s chief technology officer, who becomes a senior vice president reporting directly to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Kavukcuoglu’s new remit covers Gemini7.5 out of 10 model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini consumer app, and the developer-facing teams that ship Google’s models. Kavukcuoglu has been at DeepMind for roughly 13 years, since its early days, where he built out the lab’s deep learning team and worked on breakthroughs including WaveNet and DQN. Born in Turkey, he studied aerospace engineering at Middle East Technical University before earning graduate degrees in computer science at New York University under Yann LeCun.
Consolidating around Mountain View
Coverage of the move frames it as part of a broader effort to concentrate Google’s AI leadership and decision-making at its Mountain View headquarters, tightening the line between model development and Alphabet’s executive suite as the company competes for enterprise and consumer share against OpenAI and Anthropic. The change follows a stretch in which Google has faced scrutiny over the pace of its Gemini release cadence relative to rivals’ frontier launches.
Why it matters
This is the most significant change to Google DeepMind’s management since Google folded its Brain team into DeepMind in 2023. Moving Hassabis into a chairman and chief-scientist role while installing an operational insider in Kavukcuoglu suggests Google wants to separate long-horizon AGI research from the faster-moving job of shipping and iterating on Gemini — a split that mirrors how other frontier labs have separated research leadership from product execution as the pressure to ship competitive models has intensified.