Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis to become Alphabet chief scientist in leadership shakeup

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a leadership restructuring that elevates Demis Hassabis to chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, which focuses on drug discovery using AI.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will take on the role of Google’s senior vice president of DeepMind and will continue as the company’s chief AI architect. Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Pichai.

In a separate move, veteran Googlers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat—both long-tenured Google leaders—are departing to form an AI-focused public benefit corporation named Discovery Loop. Google will act as a founding investor in the new entity.

Discovery Loop describes its mission as building AI solutions to automatically solve problems in machine learning, science, and engineering, with the stated goal of accelerating discovery and delivering technology benefits globally.

Hassabis emphasized in an internal message that he believes the top application of AI should be to improve human health, framing the leadership changes as part of a push to demonstrate AI’s value in addressing major diseases such as cancer.