tech

Big shake-up in Google’s AI team as DeepMind chief executive steps down

Two senior engineers are leaving company to launch startup amid fears Google is falling behind in AI race

Big shake-up in Google’s AI team as DeepMind chief executive steps down

TL;DR

  • Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become chair and chief scientist at Alphabet.
  • Hassabis, a Nobel laureate for his work on protein structure prediction with AlphaFold, aims to focus on the broader implications of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
  • Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over as senior vice-president of DeepMind.
  • Senior engineers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving Google to start a new company, Discovery Loop.
  • There are investor concerns that Google is trailing competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI race.