Google parent company Alphabet announced yesterday (August 5) that it is restructuring its AI company DeepMind. CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day management to become chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist, focusing on artificial general intelligence (AGI) strategy and scientific applications.
For AlphaFold’s groundbreaking contributions to artificial intelligence and protein structure prediction, Hassabis, John Jumper, and American scientist David Baker jointly shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
According to a blog post cited by IT Home, in addition to becoming Alphabet’s chief scientist, Hassabis will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug research spin-off. Hassabis said in a post:
I have dedicated my life to the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). At this critical moment, I will serve as chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet.
This will allow me to focus on long-term strategy and accelerate scientific breakthroughs, including making full use of the research成果 from Isomorphic to help cure diseases.
DeepMind CTO and Alphabet Chief AI Architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over day-to-day operations, serving as senior vice president of Google DeepMind.
He will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, will no longer serve as an independent CEO, and will be responsible for the subsequent development of the Gemini models. In his letter, Hassabis mentioned “huge progress” made by the company’s new models and specifically named the unreleased Gemini 4.
Kavukcuoglu said:
For Google DeepMind, our mission remains unchanged: to build AI responsibly and benefit humanity.
My top priority is to ensure that we have the clearest path to realizing our ambitious Gemini roadmap and moving toward the goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI). In today’s rapidly changing environment, we must work with absolute determination and speed.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said:
We must accelerate all of this work and remain focused on the frontier of AI. At the same time, now more than ever, we need to seize the opportunity to shape the future of AGI and science.
Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean will also leave the company. Dean spent 27 years at Google and plans to co-found Discovery Loop with former Google employees Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. It is a nonprofit organization intended to automate research in machine learning, science, and engineering. Alphabet is the company’s founding investor and will provide cloud computing resources.
