Demis Hassabis is stepping away from day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind to become chairman of the AI lab and chief scientist of Alphabet, a sweeping leadership change that comes with an extraordinary explanation from the DeepMind co-founder: he believes artificial general intelligence is getting close.

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis told employees Wednesday. “It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.”

The move puts Koray Kavukcuoglu, a 13-year DeepMind veteran and one of Hassabis’ longtime deputies, in charge of Google DeepMind as senior vice president. Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.

“I’m excited that @koraykv will be stepping up to lead GDM as SVP, alongside @joshwoodward and our exec team. I could not be more excited and confident about our amazing next chapter! 🚀” Hassabis added in a post on X.

The shake-up goes beyond DeepMind. Longtime Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving to launch an independent public benefit corporation focused on machine learning, science, and engineering. Google will become a founding investor and Cloud partner in the new venture.

Alphabet shares fell about 5% following the news.

Hassabis turns his attention to AGI

Hassabis is giving up operational control at a pivotal point for Google’s AI ambitions. DeepMind has become what Hassabis calls the “AI engine room of Google,” developing the Gemini family of models that now feeds products ranging from Search and AI Overviews to the standalone Gemini app.

That app has surpassed 950 million monthly users, according to Pichai. Google says its Gemma open models have topped 900 million downloads.

Hassabis now wants more time to think beyond the next model release.

“With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability,” he told employees.

As Alphabet chief scientist, Hassabis said he will work closely with Pichai on “strategic and global AGI matters” and continue advising DeepMind’s leadership and research teams.

The change gives one of AI’s most influential researchers a mandate extending across Alphabet rather than a single operating unit.

From AlphaFold to Alphabet chief scientist

Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 before Google acquired the company for a reported £400 million in 2014.

DeepMind went on to produce AlphaGo, AlphaFold and a string of influential AI research projects. Hassabis and DeepMind researcher John Jumper shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on protein structure prediction.

AlphaFold has predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins, giving researchers a tool that has changed how scientists approach biology, disease research and drug discovery.

Hassabis will now spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed drug discovery company spun out of DeepMind in 2021.

“I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health,” Hassabis said. “It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.”

DeepMind enters the Koray Kavukcuoglu era

Kavukcuoglu is hardly an outsider brought in to restructure DeepMind. He has worked alongside Hassabis for more than 13 years and currently serves as DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect.

His history stretches back to some of DeepMind’s earliest breakthroughs. He started its deep learning team and worked on projects including WaveNet and DQN.

“The Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while,” Hassabis said.

His message contained another intriguing detail: Google is already working on new models “including Gemini 4,” offering a rare direct reference to the next major generation of its flagship AI system.

The leadership transition arrives as Google faces fierce competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and a growing field of AI labs racing to build increasingly capable models.

For Hassabis, though, the next contest appears larger than Gemini versus its rivals.

“We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history,” he told his team.

After spending more than 15 years building DeepMind, Hassabis is betting that the technology he created the company to pursue is finally coming within sight.