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 shedding his CEO title at DeepMind to take on a broader AI research role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will head the unit, reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Hassabis, one of the pioneers of modern AI, will become chief scientist of Alphabet and chair of Google DeepMind. He’s been tipped by some to be the next CEO, and lately he’s been meeting with global policy leaders and making grand speeches about the long-term future of this technology.
Jeff Dean, a top 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.
“We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier,” Pichai wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “At the same time, there’s never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science.”
The company has struggled lately to keep up with frontier AI labs. Google’s next big model has been delayed several times this year, while Anthropic and OpenAI have launched several top-performing offerings.
This is especially true in AI coding, which has become one of the most powerful and lucrative applications of this new technology. Earlier on Wednesday, Business Insider exclusively reported that Google is in talks to invest more than $1.5 billion in startup Mechanize, which specializes in AI coding evaluations and development.
The change to Hassabis’s role is the biggest part of Google’s leadership shakeup on Wednesday. He’s a chess prodigy who has led some of the most important AI breakthroughs of the past decade and more, including AlphaGo and AlphaFold.
Hassabis’s new role will give him more space to focus on longer-term AI research projects, instead of handling management responsibilities that inevitably come with being CEO of a key Google division.
“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.
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