Google Deepmind is undergoing a significant leadership overhaul as both its CEO and chief scientist step down. Demis Hassabis, the company's founder, is transitioning from day-to-day operations to become Alphabet's Chief Scientist, while Jeff Dean, the chief scientist, is leaving after 27 years to launch his own AI venture. Hassabis emphasized that this move will allow him to focus on 'the big picture' and work closely with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on 'strategic and global AGI matters.' Dean, who has been instrumental in shaping Google's AI landscape, will join Sanjay Ghemawat to start Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at automating scientific research.
Hassabis will remain at Google Deepmind's London headquarters and also dedicate more time to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery subsidiary. He has stated that 'the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health.' Ad Koray Kavukcuoglu, who previously served as Deepmind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, will take over day-to-day management. Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Pich, overseeing Gemini model development and AI research. Pichai praised Kavukcuoglu for building Deepmind's deep learning team and driving breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN.
The departure of Dean marks the loss of decades of AI expertise from Google. Discovery Loop's co-founders, including Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, are longtime Google researchers who have contributed to major projects like AlphaStar and Gemini. Alphabet will remain involved as Discovery Loop's cloud partner, supporting the startup's research framework for machine learning systems. The startup aims to address nearly all 14 Grand Challenges identified by the National Academy of Engineering.
Source: thedecoder
