Google announced a number of big changes within its executive AI leadership ranks, including Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years, Demis Hassabis stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO to be its chair, and Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over many of his responsibilities. No matter how Google spun it, the stock was down about 4% yesterday from the news.
Here are the changes in summary:
- Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to be DeepMind's chairman instead.
- Jeff Dean, who was employee number 30 and been with Google for over 27 years, is leaving Google to start Discovery Loop, with the goal of automating machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress
- Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current CTO of Google DeepMind, will serve as senior VP of the unit, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai.
- Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals a DeepMind VP and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder are leaving to go with Jeff Dean
As you may know, Jeff Dean was instrumental in building out Google Search throughout the years, especially during the early days. So we covered him a lot, here are some of those stories that mention him:
- Amazing Google Movie On How Search Works
- Jeff Dean: Combining Google Search With LLM In-Context Learning
- Google Touts Its Index Freshness As A Win For Google AI
- The AMA With Google Brain Team Teaches Us Google Won't Talk About RankBrain
- The Google Brain Team To Answer Questions On Machine Learning Tomorrow
- Google Shares Its Robots.txt Parser Code With Open Source World
- Google Dataset Search Is Now Out Of Beta With New Features
- Matt Cutts: Google Index Was Cursed In The Month Of March
- Google Stops Using MapReduce: This Does Not Impact Google Search
- Google Datasets Search - Searching Large Dataset Databases
- Ben Gomes To Take Over Search At Google, Giannandrea Steps Down
- Podcast: Google Search Product Legal Counsel, David Price
- Googley Volvo License Plate
- Old Google Photo From Google Ski Retreat In Squaw Valley In 2000
Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, said Demise is stepping up, not down. He said on X, "Demis Hassabis is stepping up to become Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet." Here is that tweet:
Just shared some changes we’re making to the teams at @GoogleDeepMind.@DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs. He’ll be able to dedicate his time and focus on shaping the future of…
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) August 5, 2026
Meanwhile Axios called it as "Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside."
Here is Jeff Dean on the move:
Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in… pic.twitter.com/U5SovZXWrU
— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026
Our immediate order of business is to find office space, and hire an amazing founding team over the next few weeks. We want to create an awesome environment with a great culture of technical excellence, teamwork, respect, and ambition. We’ll also start building our…
— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026
Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years, and watching it grow from 25 people to 190,000+ has been an amazing journey. Below is a note I shared with many people internally at Google today. An excerpt is:
— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026
It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help… pic.twitter.com/5sHj1aDiH7
Demis:
I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment, I’m stepping into a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet. This will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including…
— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) August 5, 2026
Paul Haahr from the Google Search team:
How I have Jeff Dean to thank for my job at Google paulhaahr.com/blog/2026-08...
— Paul Haahr (@haahr.bsky.social) August 6, 2026 at 1:03 AM
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Some are wondering if this is at all related to the delays with Gemini releases; I am not sure.
Interesting times...
Forum discussion at X.
