Google's AI leadership restructured; four senior executives depart; stock falls over 4%

Huo Xing Cai Jing reports that on August 6, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis announced this morning that he is stepping down from day-to-day management duties to become Chairman of DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He will continue to oversee long-term AI research and lead the new drug discovery company Isomorphic Labs. Development and delivery of Gemini will be fully managed by former DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will report directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. On the same day, legendary engineer Jeff Dean announced his departure from Google, taking with him Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le to co-found a new company called Discovery Loop. The team aims to use AI to automate the entire scientific research process—from formulating questions and designing experiments to conducting them and evaluating results. Google participated in the seed round of funding and will serve as its cloud provider, offering compute resources for the first year. Rather than attempting to retain this top-tier research team, Google has chosen to maintain its partnership through capital investment, cloud services, and scientific collaboration. According to BIT (bit.com) market data, following the announcement, the market reacted swiftly: Alphabet’s stock fell more than 5% intraday before closing down 4.03%. In after-hours trading, it rose 0.57% to $364.49.