Google announced a sweeping reshuffle of its artificial intelligence leadership on Wednesday, with chief scientist Jeff Dean departing after 27 years to launch a new startup and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis stepping into a chairman role as the company races to compete against OpenAI and Anthropic.
The changes, disclosed in a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai posted to Google’s blog, promote DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu to senior vice president of the AI division. He will lead development of Gemini 4, Google’s next major AI model, and report directly to Pichai. He will remain chief AI architect.
Alphabet shares fell about 4%. The announcement landed amid mounting financial pressure on the search giant, which turned cash flow negative for the first time on record in its latest quarter due to capital expenditures, while forecasting full-year capex of up to $205 billion. Google is pouring money into infrastructure so its cloud division can serve customers as well as its own workloads.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind. He joined Google when the search giant purchased the lab in 2014. He will become chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, which uses AI to develop drugs and solve biomedical problems. In a note to employees, Hassabis said he had decided to hand over day-to-day operational responsibilities at DeepMind so he could focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come.
“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis said, referring to artificial general intelligence, typically described as AI with human-like capabilities. He has been one of the loudest voices predicting the impending creation of AGI. “As you’ve heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health,” he added. “It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.” Hassabis said he will continue to work closely with Pichai on strategic and global AGI matters and advise Kavukcuoglu and other DeepMind leads.
Discovery Loop targets automated science
Dean’s exit marks the departure of one of Google’s most influential technical figures. He joined the company in 1999 as its 30th employee. He has been credited with core infrastructure work on Google search, including its crawling and indexing system and query-serving system, as well as significant contributions to Google Gemini’s multimodal models and early AI research. The departure is on friendly terms. Google will be a founding investor.
Dean is co-founding Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on AI for science and engineering, alongside several other top Google researchers. The co-founders include Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO.
The startup says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted. The company is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI through a process known as recursive self-improvement, which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely.
“While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,” Discovery Loop said in a press release. The founding team said in a joint statement: “The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries.”
The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participating. Dean told the New York Times that he sees an opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop, yielding both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances. Pichai said in his post that Dean and Ghemawat will work to “accelerate discoveries” in machine learning, science, and engineering. “After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that,” Pichai said.
The shake-up comes as Google’s cloud business, run by Thomas Kurian, is expanding faster than its larger rivals. Cloud revenue soared 82% in the second quarter to $24.8 billion. AWS reported revenue growth of 37% in the quarter. Azure sales climbed 43%. Pichai said on the earnings call that cloud expansion was driven by AI infrastructure and AI solutions, helped by demand for Google’s homegrown tensor processing units. The report came a day after Google announced three new Gemini models, though the company still has not released Gemini 3.5 Pro, which has been delayed. “Demand for our models is translating to strong token usage across developers and enterprise customers,” Pichai said on the earnings call. “And we continue to be supply constrained, a sign of momentum and rapid adoption.”