Google DeepMind Leadership Change: Hassabis Becomes Chair and Alphabet Chief Scientist, Jeff Dean Leaves After 27 Years

On August 5, 2026, Google published a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai on its official blog setting out changes to the company’s AI organization ³. Demis Hassabis, who has led Google DeepMind (GDM), becomes Chair of that unit and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs ¹. Day-to-day leadership passes to Koray Kavukcuoglu — GDM’s Chief Technology Officer and Google’s Chief AI Architect — who steps up as SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting to Pichai ¹.

The same memo announced the departure of Jeff Dean after 27 years at the company ¹. Dean is launching a new company, Discovery Loop, with Sanjay Ghemawat ¹².

Who Now Owns What

Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams ¹. Pichai wrote that “Koray, the current Chief Technology Officer of GDM and our Chief AI Architect, will step up as SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting to me” ¹. The memo notes that he has been at DeepMind since its early days and, over 13 years there, started the deep learning team ¹.

In practice, that means decisions about the parts developers touch daily — model releases like Gemini 3.6 Flash and features such as managed agents in the Gemini API — now sit on Kavukcuoglu’s side.

Hassabis framed his own move this way: “I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand” ¹. Of the new role, he said he “will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters, and to advise […] the GDM leads” ¹. On the models themselves: “The Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads” ¹. Reporting describes the change as Hassabis stepping back from day-to-day operational responsibilities ³.

Read only as a list of titles, the move might look like a step down, but it adds Chief Scientist of Alphabet and leaves Isomorphic Labs under his direction ¹. On what has been made public, it is a shift toward research and long-range strategy.

Pichai’s memo also notes that the Gemini app has reached more than 950 million monthly users and that Gemma models have passed 900 million downloads ¹. Splitting daily operations from long-term research is the choice being made about a business that now stretches as far as robotics models.

Discovery Loop, the Company Jeff Dean Is Building

On Dean’s departure, Pichai wrote: “After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new” ¹. The new venture is described as follows: “Jeff and Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering” ¹.

The tie to Google does not end there. The memo says Google “will continue to work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances” ¹. In other words, the former employer invests in the departing researchers’ company and supplies its compute.

According to the company’s own site, Discovery Loop is “building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering,” and will “initially focus on automating the process of machine learning research and engineering” ². The founding team listed is Dean, Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, described on the site as “three of the most-cited researchers in artificial intelligence and two of the most-cited researchers in distributed systems” ². Pichai’s memo names only Dean and Ghemawat, but Vinyals’s move has also been reported: “Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals is also leaving Google to join Dean” ³.

Starting with “automating the process of machine learning research and engineering” ² means, read plainly, beginning with the work of building AI itself. What will ship, and when, is not stated on the site; what is knowable today is the direction and the people.

What This Changes for Users

In the short term, nothing changes in front of anyone using Gemini. What was announced concerns roles and reporting lines; the memo says nothing about model availability or pricing.

The thing worth watching is what gets prioritized once a different person is making the calls. Kavukcuoglu’s remit covers both model development and the app and developer teams ¹. That could change how quickly research reaches products, but only future announcements will show it. The same applies to longer-horizon commitments such as funding for multi-agent safety research under Hassabis’s new role.

The other thread is where researchers end up. People from the core of Google are leaving, and Google itself is investing in the company they are forming and supplying its cloud ¹. Research moves outside the large companies while the compute it depends on stays inside them — that pattern now has one more instance.