Google DeepMind: Simultaneous Departures of Hassabis and Dean

Google Deepmind: Simultaneous Departures of Hassabis and Dean

Google Deepmind is undergoing a significant reorganization of its leadership. Demis Hassabis is stepping back from daily operations to become Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the company after 27 years to launch his own AI venture.

Hassabis stated that this change will allow him to focus more on "the big picture." In a message to employees, he described this moment as "pivotal in human history." He has dedicated his life to working towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and now believes it is "close." He previously described humanity as "standing at the foot of the mountains of singularity."

Hassabis will continue to work closely with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on "strategic and global issues related to AGI," while advising the Deepmind teams. He will remain based at the company's headquarters in London and will also devote more time to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's subsidiary focused on AI-driven drug discovery. Hassabis asserted that "the first application of AI should be to improve human health."

Koray Kavukcuoglu will take charge of the daily management of Google Deepmind. He previously served as chief technology officer of Deepmind and chief AI architect of Google. As senior vice president of Google Deepmind, Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Pichai and oversee the development of the Gemini model, cutting-edge AI research, the Gemini application, and Google's AI development platforms.

Kavukcuoglu joined Deepmind in its early days and has worked with Hassabis for over 13 years. Pichai stated that Kavukcuoglu built Deepmind's deep learning team and contributed to breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN. Hassabis expressed his "full confidence" in Kavukcuoglu and the rest of the leadership team.

Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Automate Scientific Research

Google Deepmind is also losing Jeff Dean, one of the most influential engineers in the company's history. After 27 years at Google, Dean is joining Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat to launch Discovery Loop, a public interest company that aims to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate scientific discovery.

Discovery Loop will initially focus on automating large-scale machine learning experiments. The founders plan to apply the same approach across a wide range of scientific and engineering fields. Anthropic and OpenAI have also integrated faster and more automated scientific research into their broader AI plans.

Discovery Loop aims to automate the research cycle, from hypothesis and experimentation to analysis.

Dean and Ghemawat helped build Google's initial research infrastructure and later worked on neural networks that, according to Pichai, "helped create the modern era of AI."

Google Loses Decades of AI Expertise

The other co-founders of Discovery Loop, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, are both long-time AI researchers at Google. Vinyals helped lead the development of AlphaStar, the AI system that defeated professional players in StarCraft II, and recently co-led the Gemini team at Google Deepmind. His Gemini colleague, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI in June. Long-time Deepmind researcher David Silver departed Google in February.

Quoc Le is one of the pioneers of deep learning at Google. He co-founded Google Brain and helped develop sequence-to-sequence models, which laid the groundwork for modern machine translation. Dean stated that the four founders of Discovery Loop have worked together for periods ranging from 14 to 30 years.

The four co-founders of Discovery Loop have contributed to building many essential Google products, infrastructures, and AI systems, ranging from Search and MapReduce to AlphaFold and Gemini.

Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are leading the initial funding round, with support from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital, and Alphabet. This round is expected to close in the coming weeks. Alphabet will remain involved as a cloud partner of Discovery Loop and plans to collaborate with the startup on a research framework for machine learning systems and infrastructures.

Discovery Loop claims that its approach could help address nearly all of the 14 Grand Challenges identified by the National Academy of Engineering.

Dean's announcement on X does not thank Google and does not mention his 27 years at the company. Departures of influential figures in the tech sector are typically accompanied by carefully prepared farewell statements, making this omission unusual. This suggests there may be more behind Dean's departure as Google faces increasing pressure in the AI field, particularly in coding, where its top models have lagged behind those of OpenAI and Anthropic. Google is counting on Gemini 4, a "much larger" foundational model currently in training, to close this gap. The company has not announced a release date.