Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become chairman of the lab and Alphabet’s first-ever chief scientist, in a leadership overhaul unveiled on August 5, 2026 that also spins out several longtime Google research luminaries into a new public-benefit corporation called Discovery Loop.
Kavukcuoglu inherits the Gemini machine
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect, will run day-to-day operations as senior vice president, reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. He inherits Gemini model development, DeepMind’s frontier research and the Gemini app team, which Pichai says now reaches more than 950 million monthly users; Google’s open Gemma models have topped 900 million downloads.
Hassabis: AGI ‘close at hand’
“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis told staff, framing the move as a chance to work on “strategic and global AGI matters” with Pichai. He will keep leading Isomorphic Labs, the DeepMind-born drug-discovery company he co-founded in 2021, and referenced work on “Gemini 4” as an example of what Kavukcuoglu will now oversee.
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat launch Discovery Loop
Longtime Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving after 27 years to found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation focused on automating scientific and engineering discovery with large-scale machine learning. DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le are joining them; Google will be a founding investor and cloud provider. Alphabet shares dropped about 5% on the news.
The reshuffle lands as Google races OpenAI’s Astra push and Anthropic’s cybersecurity-oriented Claude research, and while robotics remains a strategic frontier for DeepMind as seen in Gemini Robotics 2 on Apollo humanoids.
Reporting based on coverage from Tech Startups, Google blog and Reuters.