SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 6 — Google’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet’s chief scientist, taking on two new titles announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Hassabis wrote in a social media post that the change will allow him to focus on long-term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including work at Isomorphic Labs, an AI-powered drug discovery lab spun out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. DeepMind’s chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division’s senior vice president and oversee operations including development of Google’s Gemini models. Longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean is also leaving after nearly three decades to “try something new,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the lab for US$650 million (RM2.7 billion). Observers have been waiting for Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears delayed. Google’s shares closed 4 per cent down Wednesday afternoon. The changes come amid a wider brain drain, including Noam Shazeer leaving for OpenAI in June and John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumping to Anthropic.