Google AI shake-up sends Jeff Dean out, lifts Hassabis to Alphabet chief scientist
What's new: Alphabet shares fell about 4% as Jeff Dean left to start Discovery Loop and Koray Kavukcuoglu took over DeepMind operations.
Google overhauled its AI leadership, with longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean leaving after 27 years and DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis moving out of day-to-day management to become Alphabet’s chief scientist and chairman of Google DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s technology chief, will run the unit’s operations and lead work on Gemini 4, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai. Dean is launching a startup called Discovery Loop with Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, and Google plans to invest in it. The changes mark Google’s biggest AI reorganization since 2023 as it races with OpenAI and Anthropic and spends heavily on infrastructure. Alphabet shares dropped about 4% after the move.