Google has announced a major leadership overhaul at Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO to become Alphabet chief scientist and DeepMind chairman, focusing on AGI research. Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over day-to-day operations as SVP. Simultaneously, several prominent AI leaders — Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — have departed to launch a new AI research startup called Discovery Loop. The shake-up comes as Google faces competitive pressure from Anthropic and OpenAI, with its flagship Gemini 4 model still unreleased despite a planned June launch. Noam Shazeer recently left for OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper joined Anthropic. Google Cloud leaders view Kavukcuoglu's appointment as a positive shift toward more product-oriented commercialization of Gemini. Alphabet shares fell 4% following the announcement.
