{
  "id": 190631,
  "title": "Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO, plus more Google leadership changes",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/05/demis-hassabis-steps-down-as-deepmind-ceo-plus-more-google-leadership",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-08-05T20:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fast Company",
    "slug": "fast-company",
    "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91585719/demis-hassabis-steps-down-as-deepmind-ceo-plus-more-google-leadership-changes"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Google announced significant leadership changes on Wednesday, with DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis stepping down as CEO and taking on a new role as chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet. Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google for up to $650 million, will continue leading Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's chief technology officer, will become Google's senior vice president of DeepMind, while remaining as Google's chief AI architect. Hassabis stated that his new role will allow him to focus on the \"big picture\" and influence future developments. Google CEO Sundar Pichai praised Hassabis for his role in shaping the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI). In a separate memo, Hassabis predicted AGI could be achieved by 2030. Google's Gemini model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, was originally scheduled to launch next month but has since been delayed. This delay has raised concerns among investors who fear Google may be falling behind its competitors, who have recently poached top Google talent. OpenAI recently hired Noam Shazeer, Google's vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, while Anthropic has also poached several top AI scientists from DeepMind. Despite the delays, Pichai remains confident in Google's capabilities, stating that the company has frontier models in many areas and acknowledged the need for improvement in coding and agentic coding.",
  "summary": "Major leadership changes were announced at Google Wednesday. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a memo that Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis will take on a newly created role as the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company built off of DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind’s…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}