Google DeepMind's Hassabis becomes chairman as Jeff Dean exits for Discovery Loop

Demis Hassabis will step down from the day-to-day running of Google DeepMind to become its chairman. Staff memos published August 5 say 27-year Google veteran Jeff Dean is leaving to start a startup that Google will help fund.

Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the AlphaFold protein-structure work he led with John Jumper.

Hassabis steps back as Kavukcuoglu takes over

Hassabis is taking on two new titles, Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He is continuing to lead the company’s AI drug-discovery spinoff, Isomorphic Labs.

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote. He wanted “the time and space to focus on the big picture.”

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to AI that matches or exceeds humans across most tasks.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, until now DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect, will be senior vice president of the unit, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, and will be responsible for developing Gemini, frontier research, and the app and developer teams.

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