Alphabet announced on Wednesday that Demis Hassabis, Google’s head of AI, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet’s chief scientist and chair of DeepMind. Hassabis will focus on long-term strategy and 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. As part of the reshuffling, 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 the company after nearly three decades, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the lab for $650 million. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently chief of Microsoft’s AI segment. Google competes with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek, and Moonshot. Hassabis wrote that he has been working towards advanced general intelligence (AGI) his whole life and feels it is close at hand, prompting his decision to hand over day-to-day operational responsibilities. Observers have been waiting for Google to announce Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears delayed.