Alphabet reshuffles AI leadership, appoints Demis Hassabis as chief scientist

NEW DELHI: Google’s parent, Alphabet, on Wednesday announced a major leadership overhaul of its AI division, appointing Demis Hassabis as Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. As part of the restructuring, Koray Kavukcuoglu will become Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, while veteran engineer Jeff Dean will depart the company, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Pichai shared the announcement on his official X account. He highlighted Gemini models are seeing strong demand from developers and businesses, while the Gemini app has surpassed 950 million monthly users. Google DeepMind’s AI research continues to deliver breakthrough innovations, citing the recent advances in Gemini Robotics.

“@DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs . He’ll be able to dedicate his time and focus on shaping the future of AGI and scientific discovery. It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it. He’ll stay closely connected to Koray and the GDM teams,” Pichai noted in his post.

Just shared some changes we’re making to the teams at @GoogleDeepMind.@DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs. He’ll be able to dedicate his time and focus on shaping the future of…

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) August 5, 2026

Stressing that Kavukcuoglu has spent 13 years at Google DeepMind, Pichai credited him with building the company’s deep learning team and driving breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN.

“@Koraykv will become the SVP, @GoogleDeepMind , responsible for all aspects of model development, GDM research, and @Geminiapp & dev teams. Koray has been at GDM for 13 years and is a world-renowned expert in the field, starting our deep learning team and driving breakthroughs like WaveNet & DQN. GDM is in great hands!,” Pichai noted.

At the same time, Hassabis said artificial general intelligence (AGI) has reached a pivotal stage, describing it as “close at hand” after a lifetime of work toward the goal. Hassabis, a leading figure in AI who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, said stepping away from Google DeepMind’s day-to-day operational responsibilities would give him the time and space to focus on the broader direction of AGI and help ensure its development benefits humanity.

“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,” he said.

Hassabis expressed confidence in Koray Kavukcuoglu’s leadership, noting that the two have worked together for more than 13 years since the early days of DeepMind. As per Hassabis said Kavukcuoglu is well positioned to lead Google DeepMind’s AI research and Gemini model development. (ANI)