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Sir Demis Hassabis has stepped down as chief executive of Google DeepMind 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, the London-based group whose work resulted in a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, will 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 leaving the group to found his own start-up, which Google will back.
Google’s stock fell 5 per cent on the announcement. The search giant acquired DeepMind in 2014 for £400mn, as a bet on the future of AI.
The 16-year-old lab has been a pioneer in the development of modern AI technology, including the development of 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.
In recent months, it has overhauled its research strategy, dismantling its Nobel Prize-winning team and seeding the talent to divisions focused on Gemini, Google’s large language model.
It also assembled an internal “Code Strike” team, a group staffed to improve the company’s AI coding capabilities as it seeks to catch Anthropic and OpenAI. Google DeepMind has lost several of its highest-profile AI researchers in the interim, including David Silver and John Jumper.
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,” he said.
“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.”
Hassabis’s decision to step down was not abrupt, according to a person familiar with the matter. Hassabis 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, they said.
They added that while Google DeepMind would not become purely commercial, it was integrating further into Google’s business.
Hassabis, a child chess prodigy, has been increasingly focused on the potential impacts of advanced AI on society.
Last month, he sketched out a proposal for an industry-led AI standards body modelled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority that could mitigate some of the risks posed by frontier models.
Alphabet’s chief executive Sundar Pichai said on Wednesday that he and Hassabis had long been discussing “a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI”.
Hassabis has been critical in Google’s efforts to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic over the past three years. Research from Google laid the foundations for the AI boom, but rivals moved earlier to commercialise the technology.
“Demis has been playing the role of AI statesman for some time, and Koray has been running the Google DeepMind research for some time. So this is a formalisation of something that had been happening,” said Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Infinity Machine, a biography of Hassabis.
“DeepMind’s mission has always been to solve AGI and then use it to solve everything else. The solving AGI piece is pretty much done. So it makes sense that Demis is shifting his energy from the science to the social impact.”
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