Google Restructures AI Leadership as Senior Chief Scientist Joins Departure Wave

Google announced on Wednesday a restructuring of its artificial intelligence (AI) leadership. The move comes as the company faces delays in releasing AI models competitive with top offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, posted on X that Demis Hassabis will step down as CEO of Google DeepMind and transition to Chairman and Chief Scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind's technical lead, will now oversee all AI model development. Meanwhile, Jeff Dean, Google's current Chief Scientist, will depart along with three other senior employees to co-found a new AI startup.

Google made early investments in AI research and infrastructure over a decade ago and boasts a vast consumer and enterprise user base. However, these advantages have not translated into sustained market leadership in the new technology. Last fall, Google briefly led the race in developing powerful cutting-edge AI models with an updated version of Gemini. Since then, however, the company has struggled to keep pace with competitors' advancements, according to widely used benchmark tests.

"We must continue to move forward with clear intent in this area," Pichai said in a blog post about the leadership changes. "We are committed to staying at the forefront and highly focused on the areas we need to improve."

In addition to Dean's departure, the company has lost other top AI talent. Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the 2017 paper on the Transformer architecture that greatly advanced AI, and John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for the AlphaFold project, have recently moved to OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively. Meanwhile, Google has yet to release its latest flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro.

Investors have shown signs of impatience. Two weeks ago, after Google announced increased AI spending without providing updates on new model releases, its stock price dropped 7%. The stock later recovered, but fell nearly 4% again after Wednesday's leadership announcement.

In addition to his new chairman role, Hassabis will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, an AI-driven drug discovery startup spun out from Google DeepMind and under Alphabet, Google's parent company.

Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as employee number 30, will become CEO of a new nonprofit company called Discovery Loop. The company aims to accelerate technological progress by automating complex, multi-step scientific and engineering tasks.

Dean is joined in the venture by fellow Google veterans Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat. These scientists have made notable advances in mathematics and protein structure and are among the most cited researchers in the world.

According to a press release, the startup will initially focus on automating machine learning research and engineering processes using its internal tech stack. Ultimately, it plans to apply its technology to multiple fields, including hardware design, drug discovery, and global challenges like clean energy.

"We believe that by automating many classic experimental cycles with machine learning models to empower human scientists and engineers, we can explore a much broader space of scientific discovery," Dean said in an interview at his home in Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday.

The press release states that Alphabet is providing cloud services and computing power to Discovery Loop and is also an investor. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading its seed funding round, which is not yet complete. The startup has not disclosed its valuation.

Dean said he began seriously considering founding the company five weeks ago and reached out to Vinyals, a long-time colleague and a key contributor to AlphaFold, the AI program that predicts protein structures and won the 2024 Nobel Prize. They then contacted Le and Ghemawat to discuss how to build infrastructure to automate more types of scientific research and what would be required.

The four have known each other for over a decade. Dean co-founded Google's pioneering AI deep learning research team, Google Brain, in 2011. Le was a founding member of Google Brain, and Vinyals joined two years later.

Ghemawat is also an early Google employee. In the early 2000s, he helped create Google's distributed systems alongside Dean. In 2012, their contributions were recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The scientists decided they needed to leave Google to pursue their new mission.

"We wanted to build something in a way that's different from how Google does things now," Ghemawat said, explaining that Google's infrastructure is well-suited for large consumer applications, advertising systems, and search. However, he noted, it has "very different requirements" from the infrastructure they want to build for research.

Pichai said Dean and Ghemawat helped drive some of the company's most important technological transformations during their 27-year tenure and wished them well.

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