Google AI major restructuring: Jeff Dean leaves to start company, Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO

Google announced a major restructuring of its AI division on August 5, and more details have surfaced recently. This personnel earthquake is seen as a significant turning point in Google's AI strategy.

Key Personnel Changes

• Jeff Dean: The Chief Scientist, who served for 27 years, is set to leave. He co-founded a new company, Discovery Loop (a Public Benefit Corporation), alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Google will act as a founding investor and cloud partner.
• Demis Hassabis: Stepping down as DeepMind CEO, he will transition to DeepMind Chairman + Alphabet Chief Scientist, retaining his role at Isomorphic Labs.
• Koray Kavukcuoglu: DeepMind's Head of Technology is promoted to SVP, taking over daily operations and overseeing the development of Gemini 4, reporting directly to Pichai.

Behind the Scenes

According to reports from the Financial Times and Pathfounders, Hassabis originally planned to leave Google entirely along with Dean. However, management feared that a double departure would severely impact stock prices and ultimately persuaded him to accept the chairman position. After the news broke, Alphabet's stock price dropped by approximately 5%.

The Gemini Dilemma

Fortune revealed insights based on reports from three current and one former DeepMind employee:

• Gemini 3.5 Pro debuted at the May I/O conference with a promise to launch the following month, but has already missed its deadline three times.
• Engineers attribute this to last summer's decision to deprioritize coding, while Anthropic and OpenAI have pulled far ahead in Agent tools.
• Employees describe 60-hour workweeks, severe burnout, and a leadership vacuum.
• In June alone, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer (who went to OpenAI) and AlphaFold co-inventor John Jumper (who went to Anthropic) left the company.

Shift in Power Center

Reports indicate that this restructuring shifts control of Google's AI from London back to Silicon Valley. Co-founder Sergey Brin is now sitting near Kavukcuoglu's desk. Executives were dissatisfied with Hassabis's lack of focus on commercial needs, and his decision to release AlphaFold for free became a focal point of internal disagreement.

Source: Hongshang Net / Fortune

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