Google Restructures AI Division: Demis Hassabis Becomes DeepMind Chairman as Jeff Dean Departs

Koray Kavukcuoglu Named as New Head

Nobel laureate and Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Demis Hassabis will take on the role of chairman at the company. Jeff Dean, the senior scientist long referred to as a 'legend' within Google, has decided to leave the company.

Demis Hassabis. Reuters Yonhap News Agency

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, announced on August 5 (local time) that Hassabis will serve as chairman of Google DeepMind, Alphabet's artificial intelligence (AI) laboratory, and will also concurrently hold the position of chief scientist at Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently chief technology officer (CTO), has been appointed as the new head of DeepMind, succeeding Hassabis.

Jeff Dean, who has been with Google for a long time and currently serves as senior scientist, will leave the company to found a startup. Dean joined Google in 1999 as the company’s 30th employee and has led key technological transformations at Google, from its early search infrastructure to neural network-based AI.

Dean will co-found "Discovery Loop" with three fellow researchers—Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. This startup plans to automate machine learning research and further advance its own technology. Google is participating as a founding investor in Discovery Loop and has also entered into an agreement to provide cloud computing resources.

DeepMind is recognized as one of the leading research labs pioneering modern AI technology. It developed 'AlphaGo,' the AI system that defeated a professional Go player for the first time, as well as 'AlphaFold,' a protein structure prediction system that led to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

According to the Financial Times (FT), citing sources, Hassabis' decision to step down as CEO was not made abruptly. Hassabis is reportedly aiming to focus on more fundamental issues surrounding the impact of artificial general intelligence (AGI) on humanity and society—including leading efforts to design the future direction of AI regulation. By moving to the chairman role, he is expected to step away from day-to-day organizational management and gain the freedom to address these issues from a long-term perspective.

Hassabis plans to concentrate on long-term strategy and lead the ongoing advancement of increasingly sophisticated AGI. He said, "We have reached a pivotal moment in human history," adding, "I have dedicated my life to realizing AGI, and I now feel that it is not far off."

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