Google Shakes Up A.I. Leadership

Google shook up its artificial intelligence leadership on Wednesday, moving Demis Hassabis, the Nobel-prize winning head of its Google DeepMind lab, out of his operational role to become chair of the lab and chief scientist of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

The new job for Dr. Hassabis was announced minutes after Jeff Dean, another key A.I. researcher, said he was leaving the company to create a start-up with three other senior Google researchers.

The changes atop Google’s A.I. leadership represent a dramatic management shake-up as concerns grow over the tech industry’s spending on A.I. They also raise questions about Google’s confidence in its work on the technology.

Even though Google, under Dr. Dean’s research leadership, created some of the key technologies underpinning today’s A.I., it was caught flat-footed when OpenAI unveiled the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, launching the A.I. boom.

Since then, Google has reorganized the company and even remade the Google search homepage around A.I. But by some measurements, it has continued to trail OpenAI and its rival Anthropic. Google was expected to release a new flagship A.I. model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, in June, but that launch was delayed.

Google released several smaller models in July, including one focused on cybersecurity. That model performed well on benchmarks like coding and financial tasks, according to A.I. leaderboards, but did not outpace models from competitors.

“I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities,” Mr. Hassabis wrote, so that he could “focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.”

Google said Dr. Hassabis, who joined the company in 2014 after it acquired DeepMind and won an Nobel Prize in 2024 for using A.I. to predict the structures of millions of proteins, would be replaced by Koray Kavukcuoglu.

Dr. Kavukcuoglu was among the first researchers hired by Dr. Hassabis at DeepMind.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.