Alphabet announced a major restructuring of Google DeepMind on Wednesday, with co-founder Demis Hassabis stepping down as CEO to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, focusing on long-term AGI strategy and Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, former Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Architect, was promoted to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai.
Chief scientist Jeff Dean is departing after 27 years at Google to launch an independent AI venture with Sanjay Ghemawat, backed by Google as a founding investor. Kavukcuoglu now oversees Gemini model development, frontier research, the Gemini app, and developer ecosystems. The restructuring separates AGI/scientific strategy (Hassabis) from operational product execution (Kavukcuoglu).
Hassabis stated in a blog post that AGI is "close at hand" and that getting the next steps right is critical for humanity. He said the move lets him focus on the "big picture" rather than day-to-day operations. The reshuffle exposed tension between DeepMind's long-term scientific ambitions and Alphabet's pressure to commercialize and monetize AI faster to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.
Alphabet shares fell 4% on the news. Kavukcuoglu brings 13 years at DeepMind and pioneered work on Deep Q-Networks (DQN) and WaveNet. Architects tracking Gemini's roadmap and Google's AI product velocity should expect faster commercial releases under Kavukcuoglu while Hassabis pursues frontier research and policy engagement.