The news
On August 5, 2026, Google overhauled Google DeepMind leadership: Demis Hassabis handed day-to-day control of the AI lab to Koray Kavukcuoglu and became its chair, while chief scientist Jeff Dean said he was leaving after 27 years to start a company.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet (GOOGL), announced the changes in a message to staff that Google published the same day. Hassabis becomes Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet and will keep leading Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's drug discovery company. In his own note, Hassabis said he had decided to "hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities" so he could focus on artificial general intelligence (AGI), meaning AI that can match people across most tasks, which he wrote he feels is close at hand.
Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's Chief AI Architect, becomes senior vice president of Google DeepMind and reports to Pichai. He now oversees Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Pichai said Kavukcuoglu has spent 13 years at DeepMind, where he started its deep learning team.
Pichai also said Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation, a for-profit company with a legally stated public mission, to speed up discoveries in machine learning, science and engineering. Google will be a founding investor and cloud partner and will collaborate with them on research into machine learning systems. Fortune reported that the company is called Discovery Loop, aims to automate research, and that former Googlers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are joining.
Pichai framed the move as a way to speed up Google's AI work while Hassabis concentrates on AGI and science. He cited more than 950 million monthly users for the Gemini app and more than 900 million downloads of Google's Gemma open models, and said Google is focused on areas where it needs to improve. Fortune reported that the reshuffle followed earlier exits from Gemini's leadership and research ranks, including Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic.
The numbers
- Jeff Dean's tenure at Google
- 27 years
- Kavukcuoglu's years at DeepMind
- 13
- Gemini app monthly users (Google)
- 950 million+
- Gemma model downloads (Google)
- 900 million+
Why CEOs should care
For companies building on Gemini, the change puts the executive who runs Gemini directly under Pichai, with authority over models, research and the app. Hassabis wrote that the Gemini models were already in good hands with Kavukcuoglu and the leads, which suggests continuity. Still, ask your Google account team for the model roadmap, including the Gemini 4 release Hassabis mentioned, along with deprecation schedules and support terms, and keep contract language that lets you switch models if quality or pricing shifts.
For CTOs and HR leaders, the exits of Dean and Ghemawat, on top of the earlier departures Fortune reported, show how mobile senior AI researchers have become, even at Google. Smaller companies should expect intense competition for AI leaders. Review retention packages and succession plans for your most important technical staff, and ask which projects depend on one or two people.
For boards, Google's approach is worth studying: instead of losing Dean and Ghemawat outright, it became a founding investor and cloud supplier to their new company. Directors can ask whether similar ties with departing founders or spinouts would keep access to talent and ideas while avoiding a full exit.
The bigger picture
The move places Google's AI lab, from research to the Gemini app, under a single executive who reports to the CEO. It also shows where the field's talent is going: veteran researchers are leaving large labs to start companies of their own, and rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic have hired away senior Google researchers, according to Fortune.
What happened next
Around mid-September 2026, Business Insider reported that Discovery Loop was in talks to raise money at a valuation of about $50 billion, weeks after a reported $1 billion round at roughly a $10 billion valuation led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, according to Tech Funding News on September 14. No closed round had been confirmed in that report.
Watch whether Google ships the Gemini 4 models Hassabis mentioned under Kavukcuoglu, whether more senior DeepMind researchers leave, and what Discovery Loop builds with Google as a founding investor and cloud partner.
