Alphabet shares GOOGL fell about 4% on Wednesday after the Google parent announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its artificial intelligence division, alongside the departure of several senior AI executives, as investors assessed the company’s competitive position in the rapidly evolving AI race.
The restructuring comes at a critical time for Google DeepMind, with the flagship version of its latest Gemini model still unreleased despite an expected June launch.
The delay has fueled concerns among investors and industry observers that Google is losing ground to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which have recruited prominent Google AI researchers in recent months.
Demis Hassabis, who currently serves as Google DeepMind’s chief executive officer, will transition to the newly created role of Alphabet’s chief scientist while also becoming chairman of Google DeepMind.
According to internal memos, Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently the unit’s chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day leadership responsibilities as senior vice president while retaining his role as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.
Senior AI researchers depart to launch Discovery Loop
The leadership changes coincide with the departure of some of Google’s best-known AI researchers.
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le have left Alphabet to establish Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on machine learning, science and engineering research.
Dean, Google’s 30th employee, spent 27 years at the company and played a central role in developing Tensor Processing Units and co-founding Google Brain before its merger with DeepMind in 2023.
Discovery Loop plans to develop software and model stacks capable of automating scientific experimentation across research fields, initially focusing on machine learning before expanding into hardware engineering, clean energy and drug discovery.
The startup has also secured investment from Google and entered into a cloud computing partnership with the company’s cloud division.
The departures add to a broader talent shift within the AI industry.
Earlier this year, former Google researcher Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI, while Nobel Prize-winning scientist John Jumper moved to Anthropic.
Several Gemini developers have also recently left Google’s London office for Anthropic.
Google restructures as AI competition intensifies
Explaining his new position, Hassabis wrote: “I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health.” He added: “It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also outlined the rationale behind the move, stating: “[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI.” He added: “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.”
Alongside the leadership changes, reports indicated that Google is negotiating a transaction valued at more than $1.5 billion with coding startup Mechanize.
The reported agreement would involve licensing technology and bringing key personnel into Google to strengthen its AI evaluation and model development capabilities.
The restructuring highlights Alphabet’s efforts to reinforce its AI strategy as competition intensifies across generative AI, while investors continue to watch closely for progress on the delayed Gemini 4 model and the company’s ability to retain top research talent.
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