--- title: Demis Hassabis steps back from daily management at... description: Google DeepMind is undergoing major leadership restructuring. Demis Hassabis is transitioning to a Chair role and becoming Alphabet's Chief Scientist, stepping... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/demis-hassabis-steps-back-from-daily-management-at-google-deepmind-as-jeff-dean-departs-to-start-a-n-eysqpfbup twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Demis Hassabis steps back from daily management at Google DeepMind as Jeff Dean departs to start a new research company | daily.dev og:description: Google DeepMind is undergoing major leadership restructuring. Demis Hassabis is transitioning to a Chair role and becoming Alphabet's Chief Scientist, stepping... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/demis-hassabis-steps-back-from-daily-management-at-google-deepmind-as-jeff-dean-departs-to-start-a-n-eysqpfbup og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/eysQpFbUp.png og:image:alt: Demis Hassabis steps back from daily management at Google DeepMind as Jeff Dean departs to start a new research company og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Demis Hassabis steps back from daily management at Google DeepMind as Jeff Dean departs to start a new research company **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 4 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Google DeepMind is undergoing major leadership restructuring. Demis Hassabis is transitioning to a Chair role and becoming Alphabet's Chief Scientist, stepping back from daily operations to focus on AGI strategy, scientific discovery, and global policy. Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over operational leadership of DeepMind, which now serves Gemini to 950 million monthly users. Google also confirmed Gemini 4 is in development with no further details. Additionally, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are departing to found a public-benefit research company, with Alphabet remaining an investor and Cloud partner. The changes signal a structural split between long-term AI strategy and near-term product execution at scale. ## Content ## What happened On August 5, 2026, Alphabet announced two things simultaneously: Demis Hassabis was stepping back from running Google DeepMind day-to-day, and Jeff Dean was leaving Google after 27 years to start a new company. The timing made both moves hit harder than either would have alone. ## The DeepMind restructuring Hassabis becomes Chair of Google DeepMind and Alphabet's first Chief Scientist, a newly created role. He'll continue leading Isomorphic Labs, Google's drug discovery subsidiary, and focus on long-term AGI strategy. He's no longer running daily operations. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's CTO and already Google's Chief AI Architect since June 2025, takes over as SVP of Google DeepMind. He now owns Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai. The structural read: Google is separating long-horizon AGI research from the job of actually shipping products. Hassabis gets the former; Kavukcuoglu gets the latter. ## Discovery Loop Jeff Dean is founding Discovery Loop alongside three longtime collaborators: - **Sanjay Ghemawat** — Dean's infrastructure partner since the early Google days, co-designer of MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, and Google File System - **Quoc Le** — Google Brain co-founder, known for word2vec and seq2seq - **Oriol Vinyals** — DeepMind VP of Research, Gemini co-technical lead, AlphaStar lead, seq2seq co-author with Ilya Sutskever The four have worked together for between 14 and 30 years. Discovery Loop is a public benefit corporation. The pitch, in Dean's own framing: automate the experimental loop itself. Not AI that helps humans do research faster — AI that proposes the experiment, runs it, evaluates the result, and iterates, at a scale no human team could match sequentially. The initial focus is ML research and engineering. From there, the plan is to turn that capability on Discovery Loop's own stack, then expand into drug discovery, materials science, clean energy, and chip design. The seed round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital also participating. Alphabet is a founding investor and will supply cloud compute for at least the first year. The total raised hasn't been disclosed. Radical's Jordan Jacobs takes a board seat. Khosla GP Samir Kaul put it plainly: "Jeff and his team are one-of-one. They've been at Google 27 years and now they lift their heads up to do something different. It clearly suggests that they've decided this is something very meaningful. Otherwise, why put their legacy at risk?" ## The context that makes this worse This didn't happen in a vacuum. In the two months before this announcement, Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper left for Anthropic, taking several AlphaFold researchers with him. Dean, Vinyals, and Shazeer had all held the role of Gemini co-technical lead before their respective departures. The cumulative list of named senior exits from Google DeepMind and Google Brain now runs to more than a dozen people. Gemini 4 is still unreleased, reportedly months behind an anticipated June 2026 launch. Kavukcuoglu inherits that problem on day one. Alphabet shares fell roughly 4% on the announcement, wiping out close to $190 billion in market cap intraday. ## The strange part Google is bankrolling the startup built by the people who just left Google. Not a defection to a rival — a spinout where Alphabet holds equity and a cloud contract. The market read it as pure capability loss. The deal structure looks more like a hedge. There's a real question about whether that distinction matters. Four of the most-cited people in AI and distributed systems left in a single announcement, two of them were Gemini's co-technical leads, and the departure comes mid-Gemini-4 pretraining. Alphabet keeping a minority stake doesn't put those people back in the building. What the restructuring does signal clearly: Google has decided that the job of running a 190,000-person company's AI division and the job of doing frontier research are no longer the same job. Whether that's a smart separation or an admission that the research culture couldn't survive the product pressure is the question worth watching. ## Questions this post answers ### Who is running Google DeepMind now that Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day management? Koray Kavukcuoglu now runs Google DeepMind as SVP, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai. He was previously DeepMind's CTO and had been Google's Chief AI Architect since June 2025. He now owns Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app, while Hassabis moves to Chair of Google DeepMind and Alphabet's first Chief Scientist, focusing on long-term AGI strategy and Isomorphic Labs. _daily.dev helps engineers track leadership shifts at labs whose models power their tools._ ### What is Jeff Dean's new company Discovery Loop trying to build? Discovery Loop is building AI meant to automate the full research experimental loop itself, proposing experiments, running them, evaluating results, and iterating at a scale no human team could match sequentially, rather than just assisting human researchers. It starts with ML research and engineering, then plans to expand into drug discovery, materials science, clean energy, and chip design. It is a public benefit corporation co-founded with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, with Alphabet as a founding investor supplying cloud compute. _developers curious where AI research automation is headed can follow Discovery Loop's progress on daily.dev._ ### Why did Alphabet stock drop after the Google DeepMind and Jeff Dean announcement? Alphabet shares fell roughly 4% intraday, wiping out close to $190 billion in market cap, after simultaneously announcing Hassabis stepping back from daily DeepMind management and Jeff Dean's departure to start Discovery Loop. The market reaction reflected the cumulative loss of over a dozen named senior researchers from DeepMind and Google Brain in recent months, including Noam Shazeer and John Jumper, compounded by a delayed Gemini 4 launch that Kavukcuoglu now inherits. _daily.dev keeps builders informed on AI lab talent moves that ripple through the tools they depend on._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 3 discussions and 649 comments across hackernews, x (as of 2026-09-13). **TL;DR:** The community is largely skeptical about Google DeepMind's future given the wave of departures, with some dark humor about Gemini's struggles, though a few voices suggest leadership turnover can ultimately be healthy for organizations. The next chapter of our AI momentum: The community is broadly skeptical of Google's AI momentum narrative, viewing the leadership reshuffling as a sign of weakness rather than strength — especially Jeff Dean's departure, which many see as a seismic loss. Demis Hassabis's role change is read as a sidelining, and the cited metrics (Gemma downloads, Gemini users) are dismissed as vanity numbers. Discovery Loop: The community is largely skeptical, viewing Discovery Loop as a Google-backed talent-retention play with grandiose ambitions that sidestep real bottlenecks — physical experimentation, policy, and regulatory constraints — though a minority see genuine potential in automating the narrow slice of science that is purely computational. **Sentiment:** 14% positive · 32% mixed · 54% skeptical **The case for** - Some argue that when founding figures move on, it creates room for newer generations with fresh ideas, citing OpenAI as a precedent. - Google retains structural advantages: TPUs, data centers, the mature Google crawler, Google Books archive, and a 14% stake in Anthropic. - Automating repetitive, low-novelty experimental iterations (common in chemistry, biochemistry, materials science) could yield real value orders of magnitude faster than current PhD-student-driven workflows. - Flash models are competitively priced relative to rivals like Sonnet, which some developers find genuinely useful. - The founders' track record of delivering results at scale is seen as a genuine differentiator for attracting top researchers. **The pushback** - Multiple departures of key researchers (Jeff Dean, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, and others) are seen as a serious blow to Google DeepMind's competitiveness. - Jeff Dean's departure after 27 years is seen as a major talent loss, with some calling it the end of a golden era at Google. - Many commenters read this as a Google-funded retention vehicle for key employees rather than a genuine independent startup. - Gemini's performance is questioned, with commenters implying talent loss is a direct cause of its struggles against rivals. - Demis Hassabis's move to Chair/Chief Scientist is widely read as being kicked upstairs rather than a genuine promotion. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Deeply skeptical of the announcement's framing — Jeff Dean's exit is treated as a serious blow, Demis's new role as a demotion in disguise, and the headline metrics as hollow corporate spin. - x (skeptical): Replies are largely sardonic about Google losing top talent, with jokes about Gemini's quality and references to a broader brain drain benefiting competitors like OpenAI. **Hottest debate:** Whether high-profile leadership departures ultimately harm an organization or create healthy space for new talent and ideas. **Open questions** - Can Koray Kavukcuoglu and the remaining team stabilize Gemini development and close the reported schedule gap? - Will Google's structural advantages (TPUs, data, distribution) be enough to compete without its top research talent? - How will the company handle physical lab work, robotics, and the cost of real-world experimentation beyond simulation? - Will Discovery Loop's mission to automate the scientific experimental loop produce meaningful results, and how will its Alphabet backing affect its independence? - What is the real story behind the absence of a Gemini 3.5 Pro release? **Highlights** > @giffmana didn't the same thing happen with oai when ilya left and we were all worried it was so over for them? i think it's good when main people move on and leave more room for newer generation with newer ideas. openai had it, meta had it, and now google/deepmind. (apple had it?) > — [MaziyarPanahi on x · 1 points, 1 comments](https://x.com/MaziyarPanahi/status/2086021775301710099) > @giffmana you seen Gemini performance and you're saying this was good for it? > — [vokaysh on x · 1 points, 1 comments](https://x.com/vokaysh/status/2086014876078522667) > > Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion. > — [xnx on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184928) > > Why are people so sour about this? To many people, myself included, who have to wade through huge amounts of low-quality AI slop which is actually a negative value: no-one benefits when non-experts fire-off one-shot LLM/agent prompts to produce PRs, reports, documentation or "journalism" riddled with imagined truth and factual errors - and the more that people like me have to evaluate these inputs for our job and how wrong they are it pisses us off - but also it means we pick-up on the hallmarks, tells and cliches of these low-effort, no-respect submissions - and now the litany of tells includes this beige-themed, blurred-backdrop-navbar corporate website look: theirs site looks like the 4 or so other LLM-generated, negative-value slop-farm sites I've wasted time on recently - all over the past few weeks. So I'm saying that, without having known anything about what "Discovery Loop" is - or is not - but landing on their site and and seeing that beige colour and blurred-backdrop navbar, I immediately moved to close the tab; what kept me here was seeing the HN thread had over 100 comments by now and read more about it; if not for that then I wouldn't have given it further thought. Having "that" beige site look with same the overused looks is either an unintentional indication that the site's author used a low-effort AI prompt to generate the site and that the content within is likely to be low-quality, low-value - or it's an intentional lure to appeal to those who uncritically share in the AI psychosis and so, I assume, are a good target to seek investment from even if it means losing the audience of cynical Internet critics like myself because they know people like me won't be breathlessly repeating their vision-statement on LinkedIn and throwing money at them - kinda like how scam emails intentionally include mistakes for better audience selection. And both possibilities have unpleasant implications. ------ Anyway, regardless of the background of the team behind it, the way the project is described sounds exactly like the recursive-self-improvement and simulated-science thought-experiments from _that other website_ - it's the kind of thing I expect Angela Collier to brutally takedown in an amusing video. > — [DaiPlusPlus on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187385) > @giffmana Some say his leaving is the main reason Gemini got crushed > — [AlbertBuchard on x](https://x.com/AlbertBuchard/status/2086018042010488910) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755) · 201 points · 384 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184960) · 349 points · 214 comments - [x](https://x.com/giffmana/status/2086008351524008280) · 0 points · 47 comments - [x](https://x.com/tbpn/status/2085828731164397794) · 0 points · 4 comments - [x](https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/2085665777060098063) · 0 points · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#google-gemini](https://daily.dev/tags/google-gemini), [#google-deepmind](https://daily.dev/tags/google-deepmind) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/demis-hassabis-steps-back-from-daily-management-at-google-deepmind-as-jeff-dean-departs-to-start-a-n-eysqpfbup) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Demis Hassabis steps back from daily management at Google DeepMind as Jeff Dean departs to start a new research company","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/demis-hassabis-steps-back-from-daily-management-at-google-deepmind-as-jeff-dean-departs-to-start-a-n-eysqpfbup","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/demis-hassabis-steps-back-from-daily-management-at-google-deepmind-as-jeff-dean-departs-to-start-a-n-eysqpfbup"},"datePublished":"2026-08-05T16:15:31.730Z","dateModified":"2026-09-13T19:21:31.640Z","description":"Google DeepMind is undergoing major leadership restructuring. 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