At Google, a major overhaul is underway at the head of artificial intelligence.

The Mountain View giant announced a major reorganization of its artificial intelligence division on Wednesday. Demis Hassabis is stepping down from his operational leadership role, while several prominent researchers are also leaving.

Google announced a major reorganization of its artificial intelligence (AI) division on Wednesday, with the removal of its iconic leader, Demis Hassabis, from day-to-day management and the departure of several top researchers, amid a backdrop of falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, fell by about 4% on Wednesday following the announcement.

Demis Hassabis, the 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry and co-founder of DeepMind, is stepping down from his operational role at Google DeepMind, the laboratory that designs the Gemini AI models. The Briton will become chairman of this entity and chief scientist at Alphabet, to dedicate himself, as he wrote in a message to employees, to the advent of "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), a stage he believes is "within reach" where AI will become as capable as the human brain.

This reshuffle comes as the Mountain View (California) giant struggles to keep pace with the leaders in the AI race, despite having made up some ground. Its new flagship model, the Gemini 3.5 Pro, initially promised for June, has still not been released, while its competitors OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude) have launched several models considered more powerful, particularly for generating computer code.

Commercial shift

The day-to-day management of Google DeepMind will now be handled by Koray Kavukcuoglu, the lab's former chief technology officer. In a sign of increased control, he will report directly to Sundar Pichai, the head of Google and Alphabet, with the title of senior vice president, rather than general manager. According to several American media outlets, his appointment is expected to emphasize DeepMind's commercial rather than scientific focus. The Gemini application boasts over 950 million monthly users.

At the same time, the group announced several high-profile departures, including that of Jeff Dean, considered one of the fathers of Google's technical infrastructure, after 27 years with the company. Along with three other renowned researchers—Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le—he founded Discovery Loop, a startup aiming to automate scientific research using AI. Google has invested in the new company and will provide it with computing power, Sundar Pichai stated.

These changes come on top of a talent drain: in June, Noam Shazeer, one of the inventors of the technology behind today's generative AI, left for OpenAI, while John Jumper, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with Mr. Hassabis, joined Anthropic, the other AI champion in San Francisco.