DeepMind founder ascends to singular AI role at Google

Demis Hassabis, the visionary behind Google's DeepMind, is taking on a new role as chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company, leaving behind his position as DeepMind's CEO. This transition comes after Jeff Dean departs to join a start-up. In his new role, Hassabis aims to "actively shape the future of AGI," or artificial general intelligence, according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Despite the change, Hassabis will maintain his research commitments at Google's spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which focuses on drug discovery. He will also retain his role as chair of DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently the CTO of DeepMind, will assume the position of leading the company directly under Pichai. Hassabis, a long-standing advocate of AGI, has been at the forefront of the AI field since co-founding DeepMind in 2010.

He has predicted that AGI could become a viable technology within the next three years. Recently, Hassabis has called for increased self-regulation in the market to facilitate AGI development. In a recent Inside Google blog post, Hassabis expressed his excitement about the pivotal moment in human history, emphasizing the importance of ensuring the correct steps are taken to bring about AGI and usher in a new era of discovery and wonder.