Google is shaking up its AI leadership, with some of the company’s top experts in the field moving roles or leaving. Shares of the tech giant fell as much as 5% on the news.
Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of DeepMind to take on a broader role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company. That’s a huge change, as he was tipped by some to be the next CEO.
Hassabis, one of the pioneers of modern AI, will become chief scientist of Alphabet and chair of Google DeepMind, CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Jeff Dean, a leading AI researcher who’s been at Google for decades, is leaving to start his own initiative, Discovery Loop, with Sanjay Ghemawat, another top tech leader at the search giant.
“With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability,” Hassabis said in a memo to colleagues, which was published by Google.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will head the unit as senior vice president, reporting to Pichai.
The company has struggled lately to keep up with frontier AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI, especially in AI coding, which has become one of the most powerful and lucrative applications of this new technology.
Google’s next big AI model has been delayed several times this year, while Anthropic and OpenAI have launched several top-performing models.
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