Google parent company Alphabet has announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders working on its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company.
The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which hired a star Google AI staffer this summer.
Shares of Alphabet fell 4% after the news.
Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet’s chief scientist and transition from Google DeepMind CEO to chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the approaching arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state of AI in which computers, in essence, become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change.
“[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate company-wide memo.
“It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.”
Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit’s chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice-president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.
Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le — some of Google’s most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders — left the company to launch a start-up called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The start-up is structured as a public benefit corporation.
Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing.
– Reuters