DeepMind's Hassabis and Dean step back from day-to-day leadership

Demis Hassabis is moving to chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. Jeff Dean is leaving Google after 27 years to start a new AI startup called Discovery Loop. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's former CTO, becomes SVP of DeepMind and Google's chief AI architect, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai.

Why it matters: This is the biggest leadership change at a frontier AI lab in years — Hassabis and Dean have been the public faces of Google's AI research since DeepMind's founding era. Losing Dean to a new startup while Hassabis moves into a more strategic, less hands-on role raises real questions about whether Google can keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic on model development speed.