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Hassabis exits DeepMind CEO role; Jeff Dean departs to launch Discovery Loop

The reshuffle underscores mounting pressure on Google to defend its AI lead as rivals race toward more capable models.

• Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become chairman of the unit and chief scientist of Alphabet, while chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving to start Discovery Loop, a company Google will invest in.
• Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's current chief technology officer, becomes senior VP running day-to-day operations, reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
• Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and Google Brain co-founder, is joined at Discovery Loop by senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind VP Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le to build a startup focused on automating scientific discovery.
• Alphabet's stock fell more than 4% on the news, cutting into a 13% rally the shares had made since a post-earnings low.
• Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind and won a 2024 Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, will keep leading Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug-discovery spinoff, while shifting his focus to AGI strategy.
• The simultaneous exit of two of Google's most storied AI figures highlights how the frontier-model race with OpenAI and Anthropic is reshaping even the most established AI organizations.