Big shake

Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind, in a leadership overhaul of the UK-based AI research lab.

Hassabis, a Nobel prize recipient, is leaving his main managerial role to become chair of DeepMind – as well as taking on the new position of chief scientist at Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company. DeepMind will now be led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, its chief technology officer, under the title of senior vice-president.

London-born Hassabis, 50, has been a totemic figure in AI’s breakthrough era, co-founding DeepMind in 2010 and selling it for £400m to Google four years later. His efforts led to him winning the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for breakthroughs in predicting and designing the structure of proteins, via DeepMind’s AlphaFold model.

Shares in Alphabet, a $4.4tn (£3.3tn) company and a leading player in the AI race, closed down 4% on Wednesday.

Hassabis said on Wednesday he had been working towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a theoretical state where a system can match a human at any cognitive task – and felt it was “close at hand”.

Adding it was critical to ensure the achievement of AGI “goes well for humanity”, he said: “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.”

As befits a Nobel winner, Hassabis has played the more thoughtful, statesmanlike role in the AI industry in recent years. Last month he called on the US to establish a global AI watchdog to monitor the world’s most powerful models.

“What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilisation unfolds,” he wrote on Substack. “By safely stewarding AGI into the world, we can enter a new golden age of scientific discovery and progress, and usher in a bright future of incredible human flourishing.”

Hassabis will also remain as chief executive of Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind.

Several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, are departing the company, Google said. He and Sanjay Ghemawat, another leading engineer, are leaving the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering.

Some investors are concerned that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which hired a leading Google AI employee this summer. Both have made advances in creating coding agents.