Google Overhauls AI Leadership As DeepMind CEO Steps Aside

Google is restructuring its artificial intelligence (AI) leadership as Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, eases off day-to-day management to become chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist. In his place, Google's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Koray Kavukcuoglu, assumes operational control. Reportedly, several key researchers, including Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, are departing to establish their own venture.

According to Axios, Hassabis will hold the title of chief scientist for Alphabet and continue leading Isomorphic Labs, the spinoff AI drug discovery company. Kavukcuoglu will take up the role of senior vice president of the unit, reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Dean, a 27-year veteran of Google, is venturing into Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation where Google will be an investor and cloud provider.

He will be joined by Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, as well as Oriol Vinyals, a DeepMind Vice President, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. Dean revealed in an interview with The New York Times that leaving Google, a public company, provides him more latitude to concentrate on AI-related scientific discoveries. "We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's pure financial interests," Dean told NYT.

Hassabis acknowledged in a statement that he feels "it is close at hand" and that his time at Google will be crucial in ensuring the next steps are right, aiming to usher in a new age of discovery and wonder for humanity.