Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down, but will remain with the company

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down. He's one of the co-founders of the artificial intelligence research laboratory and has been CEO since 2010.

Hassabis is, however, staying with the company. He's transitioning to chairman of the organization. DeepMind has not historically operated with a traditional corporate chairman that is separate from its executive leadership, but now it looks like it will. He's adding another title, that of chief scientist for Google's parent company Alphabet. He will also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, which uses AI to try to come up with new pharmaceutical products.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current CTO of Google DeepMind will serve as senior VP and will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. He's taking over leadership of day-to-day operations.

This isn't the only shakeup at DeepMind. Hassabis was given the role of chief scientist because Jeff Dean, who currently operates in the position, is leaving to go form a startup called Discovery Loop. Dean is bringing several colleagues with him on this venture and Google is investing an unspecified amount in the company and will act as its cloud provider. That sounds a bit like circular financing to me, as Google will invest in an entity that will spend some of that money on the company's cloud services. We'll have to wait and see how that all shakes out.

Discovery Loop will be focused on building AI models that improve themselves with little or no help from humans. "We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," Dean said in an interview with The New York Times.

Google's AI arm has been undergoing a drastic transformation as of late, likely because it's facing serious pressure to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic in the generative AI arms race. The company recently disbanded the AlphaFold team, of which Hassabis was a member. Some employees were reassigned and others left. 

AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict the 3D structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes. This kind of thing used to take years. The technology is now being used to develop therapies for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. This work actually earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

In addition to the aforementioned shakeups, Google has announced plans to invest up to $40 billion with Anthropic. The company invested $10 billion back in April, with $30 billion more coming if Anthropic meets specific performance milestones.